Broken Mirrors

a serial novel by TA Pratt

“You’re fired,” the Chamberlain said. “There. I could have been more diplomatic, and normally I would be, but I know how much you value directness, so there it is. You are no longer chief sorcerer of Felport.”

“Look, I know you’re pissed.” Marla sat back in one of Hamil’s comfy armchairs. “The Mason did some serious damage, I get that, but I did defeat her, you know. My job is protecting the city, and I succeeded.”

“You were the one who put the city in danger.” The Chamberlain was dressed impeccably as always, this time in a midnight blue evening grown, and she was even wearing an understated diamond tiara. As understated as a jewel-studded crown could be, anyway. “Your hubris led to the deaths of Dr. Husch, Viscarro, Ernesto, Granger…” She shook her head. “This isn’t open to discussion. You’re out. Now, the terms of your exile –”

“This is ridiculous. You can’t just unilaterally oust me. Deposing a sitting chief sorcerer takes a unanimous vote. Tell her, Hamil.”

“She knows,” Hamil said. “The vote was unanimous.”

Marla stared at him. “Et tu, fat man?”

“I have supported you in almost every endeavor you’ve undertaken,” Hamil said gravely. “But I did not support your violation of the laws of space and time. I know you love Felport, Marla… but it’s clear you loved Bradley Bowman more. You put your feelings for him above the safety of your city. You deserted us, and while you were gone, we were attacked by a monster – a monster that only had access to our world because of the choices you made. Yes, you stopped the Mason. We’re glad. But you started the Mason, too, and we can’t ignore that.”

“Sorry, Marla,” the Bay Witch said. Beautiful, blonde, dripping seawater all over the carpet, just like always – but now she had a deep frown line in her forehead, marring her carefree surfer-girl look. “I like you. I think you have pretty hair and you were pretty nice and good to me, pretty nice and good to the waters, pretty good, but what you did was bad. No pretty, just bad.”

“Okay.” Marla thought frantically. “Okay, I fucked up, totally, but what about my past service? Hell, in the past year I saved the city from the god of death and the king of nightmares and the beast of Felport and the great god Xorgothua and those things that claimed to be elves and –”

“We are aware of your past contributions,” the Chamberlain said. “Which is why you are being offered exile instead of execution. You impossible woman, don’t you understand, you caused the death of half the council! If you’d spent another few hours off on your little otherworldly adventure, Hamil and I would be dead, too, and the city obliterated. You. Must. Go.”

“There aren’t enough of you,” Marla said, though part of her was thinking, If I’m arguing on procedural grounds, I’m screwed. “You three aren’t enough for a quorum, so –”

“We elevated Langford to Ernesto’s position,” Hamil said tiredly. “And Mr. Beadle to Viscarro’s. We were all in agreement. Marla, it’s over.

“But there’s still stuff to do! Crapsey and Nicolette are both running around loose out there, somebody will have to –”

Hamil shook his head. “We can take care of them, Marla. They aren’t your concern anymore. Please hand over your dagger of office.”

Marla stared at him, then stood up, refusing to let herself tremble. How dare they. The first time an atomic monster from the center of the Earth attacked, or a cult devoted to the Bad Old Ones summoned something with more tentacles than brains, the council would beg to take her back, and she’d refuse them. For a little while. Just at first. Then she’d come back and save them. After she was sure they were really sorry. But for now, she’d act with dignity. She drew the Mason’s dagger and offered it hilt-first to Hamil. The other dagger, she intended to keep – what they didn’t know wouldn’t bother them. That knife wasn’t really Felport’s dagger of office, anyway. The original blade had been lost, something the rest of the council didn’t know, and its identical replacement was a personal gift from the god of Death. And, damn it, that belonged to her. Giving them the Mason’s dagger was a lot closer to returning the original weapon anyway.

Hamil shook his head. “Don’t give the dagger to me. The Chamberlain is taking over as chief sorcerer.”

“The Chamberlain?” Marla said.

Hamil nodded. “We’re elevating Perren River – the head of the Honeyed Knots – to the Chamberlain’s old spot on the council.”

“Perren’s great, that’s fine, put her on the council, but giving the Chamberlain my job? That’s not the succession plan I worked out –”

“Enough.” The Chamberlain’s voice was sharp enough to slice tendons. “Your plans are irrelevant. I hereby claim the position of chief sorcerer of Felport.”

As soon as the Chamberlain announced her claim, a yawning absence opened in Marla’s center. The part of her that sensed Felport went silent. It was like having a tooth pulled, only instead of a tooth, it was more like her heart.

The Chamberlain snatched the dagger from Marla’s hands. Marla prayed the knife wouldn’t recognize her authority – that it would turn and slice all the Chamberlain’s fingers off – but the dagger recognized its new mistress, and behaved.

“Please,” Marla said, telling herself it wasn’t begging, it was just asking, “Don’t send me away. Felport is my home. I’ve lived here more than half my life. Surely I deserve –”

“You have twenty-four hours to set your affairs in order,” the Chamberlain said. “Which is about twenty-three more hours than I wanted to give you. After that, you leave – via the airport, if you please. I don’t want you squatting on the outskirts of town, moping around. Be gone by this time tomorrow, or I’ll have you removed.”

“I don’t even get a severance package?”

The Chamberlain smiled icily. “We’ve decided not to sever your head from your body. That’s your severance package.”

Marla looked to Hamil for help, but he just shook his head. “Good luck, Marla. I do wish you well, and hope you’ll stay in touch.”

“Yes, don’t forget to write,” the Chamberlain said.

“Fuck you all,” Marla said. “You’ll be sorry.”

“Maybe someday,” the Chamberlain said, “You’ll grow up enough to realize you’re the one who has something to be sorry for.”

#

“Didn’t seem prudent to mention my new status on the council,” Langford said, packing up his doctor’s bag. Beta-Marla was in Bradley’s old room, nestled in the covers, staring at the ceiling. “My elevation to the council was certain to be a sore point, and we were both too busy for, hmm, shouting and recriminations.”

“I can’t believe you voted to throw me out,” Marla said, staring at her doppelganger. She was catatonic, totally checked-out from the world. Lucky bitch.

“Nothing personal. I’ve enjoyed working with you over the years. It was simply the logical decision. The Chamberlain’s arguments were compelling. I’m taking over administration of the Blackwing Institute, by the way, at least until Dr. Husch can be put back together again. Assuming she’s sane once she’s reassembled, she can have the job back.”

“Who’s going to run your lab while you’re off playing councilman and chief head-shrinker?”

“You haven’t met my apprentice, have you? She doesn’t come out of the lab much. Danielle Ching-Yi Kong. She’ll be looking after my interests in the city. Very bright woman. Started out washing retorts and calibrating machinery for me, but she’s developed into a top-notch experimental alchemist. She’s nearly cracked the problem of chrysopoeia and the creation of the Alkahest, and is making great strides toward perfecting the panacea.”

“You lost me at ‘problem,'” Marla said.

Langford blinked. For as long as Marla had known him, he’d had trouble understanding that not everyone had access to the same inner mental landscape he did. “Ah. Suffice to say she’s a young woman who’s going places.”

“Me too. Though I’m not young, and I’m not going anyplace I want to go.” She nodded toward Beta-Marla. “What happens to her?”

“We’ll keep your, ah, interdimensional twin at the Institute, very comfortably. She’ll have the best therapy. Perhaps someday she’ll recover her faculties.”

“Can I visit her?” Marla said.

“The Institute is outside the city limits of Felport, so I believe the terms of your exile will allow that.” Langford glanced at his watch. “You should collect your personal belongings. The Chamberlain will be over soon to take all your files back to her own office.”

Marla nodded and left the room, not bothering to thank him for his years of service, any more than he’d thanked Marla for hers.

Her office door was open, and Rondeau was sitting on her couch. “Is it true?” he said. “Those ingrates are actually throwing you out?”

“Yeah.” She sat in her chair and looked around the room. What should she take with her? The antique chatrang board her predecessor had given her? Her mummified baby alligator, which she had on the theory that every sorcerer’s lair should have a mummified reptile of some kind? Her scythe-shaped letter opener?

In the end, she just took the little silver bell from her cut-open desk drawer, careful not to let it ring. She looked at Rondeau. “Bye,” she said. “You’ve been a good friend. Better than I deserved, maybe. Take care of yourself.”

Rondeau stood up. “Marla, where will you go?”

She didn’t answer him, just shook her head, and went out into the city. Her walk to meet the Mason hadn’t been her last walk in Felport after all.

But this one would be.

#

Marla stood in the airport, staring at the departure boards. Numbness had given way to anger and been replaced by exhaustion. She’d walked all night and into the morning before going to her apartment and packing up her last few things She had her leather shoulder bag with a few clothes and a couple of books, and a rolling suitcase with more clothes and toiletries and other essentials. Her entire life in two bags.

She also had an enchanted boarding pass, courtesy of the Chamberlain, which would allow her onto any plane she wanted to board, and insured her a seat in first class. And if the flight was full, well, the airline would figure it was their screw-up, and somebody would get bumped to make room for her. Marla had enough magic of her own to make that happen.

“What’re you thinking?” Rondeau said, appearing at her shoulder. “Scenic Newark New Jersey? Or Scranton Pennsylvania? I hear Scranton is beautiful this time of year. By which I mean almost damn winter.” He wore a loud aloha shirt and sunglasses, and had an enormous rolling suitcase of his own, a garment bag slung over his shoulder, and a bulging backpack.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“Heading out of town. I haven’t had a vacation in, well, ever. Though this is less a vacation and more a change of life. I sold the club to Hamil.”

“What are you talking about? You love the club!”

He shrugged. “Bradley’s body isn’t as good at staying up all night. Different circadian rhythms or whatever. And he’s got no tolerance for the drugs I like. Nah, that’s a bad scene for me now. Besides, Hamil offered me, like… obscene amounts of money for the club. I knew the place was valuable, what with the special conference room and all, but damn – I think he paid me double what it’s worth because he felt bad about firing you. The cash I have now, it’s beyond fuck-you money, Marla. It’s fuck everybody money. I can spend the rest of my life drinking rum and coke and getting happy endings from buff Swedish masseurs.”

“Lucky you,” she muttered.

“You mean lucky you. You’re my best friend, Marla. Come with me.”

She frowned. “Really? You don’t think I’m a traitor to the city and a danger to myself and others?”

“My loyalty was never to Felport. My loyalty was to you. You forgave me for killing Bradley – I can forgive you for trying to save him. So what do you say? Sit next to me on my flight? You can always go brood in some horrible coal-mining town if you don’t like my idea, but you should try it first.”

“What’s your idea?”

“Hawaii. Specifically Maui. Specifically a luxury resort in Maui where I’m assured the pina coladas never stop flowing.”

She made a face. “Hawaii? Seriously? Isn’t that kind of a cliché? You really expect me to do the whole tropical paradise thing –”

He shrugged. “Do, or don’t. I wish you would, but my flight’s boarding soon, and I’m the one with the bulging checkbook, so this time, I get to pick the destination.”

Marla laughed. “So this means I won’t get to boss you around any more?”

“You aren’t my employer anymore,” he said. “But I’m sure you can still dominate me through sheer force of personality.”

“That’s something, at least,” Marla said, and followed him toward the security line.

#

Crapsey woke up after dawn under the overpass where he’d spent the night, shivering, with a wicked need to piss. He limped behind a pillar and unzipped, staring up at the underside of a highway as the stream of urine steamed on the ground. How had it come to this? Alone, in the cold, friendless, in the wrong world, trapped in this one lousy body, with nothing but the ill-fitting suit on his back, his butterfly knife, and an enchanted jaw that made him look like something out of a monster movie. Plus, he was hungry. He’d been able to kill and take with impunity when he was the Mason’s right hand, but back then he’d had her support, and he’d been immortal. If he died now, he’d go insane, trapped in a corpse, forever. What the hell was he supposed to do?

“You’re better hung than I thought you’d be.” Nicolette slid down the hill from the freeway above, one arm of her shirt flapping empty, holding the silver hatchet in her remaining hand. “You hear your boss got her ass whipped?”

“What? What do you mean?”

Nicolette shrugged. “Marla beat her. I’m not sure how – my network of spies isn’t what it used to be – but word is, the crisis is over, and the Mason was neutralized.”

“Damn,” Crapsey said. “Damn. That’s the first bit of good news I’ve heard.” He zipped up. “But, with Marla still standing, doesn’t that make you a dangerous fugitive? Just like me?”

Nicolette tucked her hatchet into her belt and seesawed her hand. “Sorta kinda. This is the good part – Marla got canned. Because she’s the reason the Mason came to this world, see – the rest of the council fired her ass, and they’re sending her into exile. Poof. She’s gone.”

“Shitty ending for everybody, then.” He looked around for somewhere to sit, thought, Fuck it, and just sat on the dirt.

“Ending? Oh, no. I’m just getting started. What do you say, Jawface – want to conquer the world with me?”

“I’ll pass. World conquering’s not really my thing. Been there, done that.”

“Good. Just checking to make sure you didn’t have crazy ambitions. My real goals are a lot more modest. Marla Mason is alone, friendless, stripped of her artifacts, and without support. She’s never been weaker than this. So I figure… now’s the time to kill her.”

“Knock yourself out,” Crapsey said. “I’ve got no beef with Marla. Rondeau, on the other hand… that’s a guy I’d like to kill. And if he can’t be killed, then I want him to suffer, trapped in a single meatsack like I am, tormented forever.”

“Sure,” Nicolette said. “You know, when I said Marla was friendless, I should have said almost friendless – except for Rondeau. I hear he’s going with her, wherever she’s going. So what do you say? Help me kill Marla, and I’ll help you torture Rondeau?”

Crapsey shook his head. “It’s a good plan in theory, but Marla beat the Mason. How are we going to stand a chance against her? I can’t even jump bodies anymore.”

“Oh, but you’ve got other talents.” Nicolette draped her remaining arm over his shoulders. “As for how to kill her… to kill both of them… Don’t worry about that. I’ve got some good ideas.”

Oh well, Crapsey thought. Nicolette’s nuts, and we never did get along. But at least it’s something to live for. “Why the hell not,” he said. “Let’s kill them both.”

#

The next day, Marla sat in a comfortable chair in one of the outdoor restaurants attached to their hotel – which was, indeed, improbably luxurious. The weather wasn’t as hot as she’d expected. This late in the year, Maui didn’t swelter, though it was perfectly pleasant outside. She had a cup of the best coffee she’d ever tasted in front of her, alongside a plate of mostly-demolished macadamia nut pancakes, probably the tastiest breakfast she’d ever had. The view from Kaanapali, here on the island’s western shore, was breathtaking: the deep blue ocean, and the islands of Lanai and Molokai both visible in the distance. Down on the beach there stood a row of white tents, side flaps open to admit the ocean breeze, and in one of them Rondeau was getting the first of what he expected to be many massages. Though presumably of a non-erotic variety; this was a classy joint.

The rest of Marla’s day stretched out before her, vast as the ocean. She thought she might swim in the hotel’s ridiculously huge pool, soon. And then have some lunch. Maybe a walk on the beach after. Thinking beyond that, to what she might do tomorrow, next week, next year… she didn’t dare let her mind go there yet. For the first time in years, she had no purpose, no goal, no center, no services to perform, no responsibilities, no job. The prospect was more terrifying and depressing than refreshing and freeing. She wondered if it always would be.

What she did have, right now, was a nice pen and a thick stack of postcards purchased from the hotel gift shop. The postcards had pictures of the ocean, and palm trees, and islands seen from the sky, and volcanoes, and tropical flowers, and fish, and sea turtles, and birds, and bore legends like “Wish you were here” and “Hello from paradise.” There were enough postcards there for every single person she knew back home, with plenty left over for everyone she knew anywhere else, too.

After the waiter refilled her cup with kona coffee, Marla took the first postcard from the stack – this one had a picture of a grinning shark, appropriately. She took the pen in her hand, thought a moment, and began to write.

“Dear Chamberlain,” she wrote. “I hope wolves eat your guts, sharks bite off your face, and hornets use your asshole for a nest. Also, your fashion sense sucks. Who wears a ball gown to a business meeting? What are you, a Disney princess? Love from the beach, Marla.”

She stuck a stamp on that postcard and placed it face-down on the other side of her plate. One love letter down. A few dozen more to go.

Maybe, she thought, life in exile won’t be so bad.

“So that’s the succession plan,” Marla said, sipping a cup of coffee on the balcony, doing her best to enjoy what might possibly be her last peaceful view of the city, her city, the home of her heart. She yawned. It was only afternoon, but her body-clock was all screwed up. Inter-dimensional jet lag.

Hamil nodded glumly. “Understood.”

Marla reached across the table and patted her old friend’s hand. “I know you don’t want the job, but you’d be a better interim chief than the Chamberlain. She’d let everything south of the river go to hell.”

“I think you underestimate her,” Hamil said, “but I take your point.” They were at his penthouse, a highly-fortified apartment that wouldn’t withstand an assault by the Mason for more than five minutes. But then, as far as they knew, pretty much no place on Earth was safe from the Mason, so why not spend the time they had left in comfort rather than in a cramped safe house? “I wish I had more confidence in your plan,” he said. “It depends entirely on an assumption of ignorance on the Mason’s part that might be faulty. And even if it works, there’s a good chance you won’t survive. What if the Mason knows –”

Marla put her cup down. “Then we’re fucked. That simple. I could come up with a better plan if I had a week, maybe, but I don’t. This is it. Thanks for letting me grab a nap and shower here. And for not tearing me a new one. I know all this is my fault, but I’m going to fix it. I hope.”

“I thought I’d save the screaming until the immediate crisis was past,” Hamil said. “Seemed more prudent. The other sorcerers in the city are… less patient… but I convinced them now was not the time to air their grievances.”

“It’s a clusterfuck all right. Still, I’d rather fight my evil twin than deal with the council’s bitching.”

Hamil laughed softly, without humor. “What council? The only ones left are me, the Chamberlain, and the Bay Witch, and she barely takes an interest in our landward affairs.”

“I’ll avenge them all, Hamil. I should go.”

Her consigliere looked at the ornate watch on his wrist. “You have a little time yet. I’ll have a car brought around.”

Marla shook her head. “No. I’m walking. It’s not that far. And there’s a chance I might not walk away from this meeting, so…” She shrugged. “Could be my last walk. If I don’t come back… thanks, Hamil. Your support over the years has meant everything.”

“I love you like a daughter, Marla. The sort of daughter who breaks curfew and throws plates against the wall and gets tattoos, perhaps, but still – a daughter.”

Marla pushed back from the table. “Take care, fat man.”

#

The air had a crisp bite that made her glad to be wearing the cloak. The sky was the gray of dirty wool. Dead leaves crunched underfoot, at least until she left the relatively posh neighborhood where Hamil lived and reached the poorer blocks where there were more pawn shops and corner stores than trees. Cabs honked, buses rumbled past spewing exhaust, and half a dozen aggressive homeless men panhandled her – and the one or two who were initiates of the mysteries gave her respectful nods instead. She breathed deep the air of her city, and hoped she’d emerge soon to breathe it again.

She reached Rondeau’s club, pushed open the front door, and stepped inside to strike a bargain with a devil.

#

The Mason was on the far side of the bar, leaning forward like a bartender listening to a regular’s lament, though she was doing most of the talking, to Rondeau’s dismay. When the door creaked open, Rondeau looked up from his stool, spun around, and gave the new arrival a little wave. “Hi, Marla. So it turns out the Mason wants to hire me.”

“You want to work with this treacherous little shit?” Marla said, looking past him to her dark doppelganger.

Rondeau winced. Marla had to be faking that tone of cold hate and contempt, but it still stung – not so long ago, she’d been calling him stuff like that in all sincerity.

Marla approached the bar. “Rondeau can’t control himself. If he stubs his toe or gets a toothache he might decide he’s dying and leap from his body and kill your best general.”

“We both know his lack of control will cease to be a problem soon,” the Mason said.

Marla took a seat next to Rondeau. “Did you tell him what’s going to happen?”

“A horse doesn’t need to know he’s being bought and sold,” the Mason said.

Marla sighed. “Right. You want to do this thing?”

“Wait wait,” Rondeau said. “Do what thing?”

“We are making a trade,” Marla said carefully. “I’m giving the Mason what she wants, and in exchange, she’s going away.”

Rondeau frowned. “What, you’re trading me? But… I already told her I’d work for her. I don’t need your permission.”

“Silly Crap – Rondeau,” the Mason said. “That’s not the trade. We’re trading this body –” she gestured at herself – “For Marla’s cloak.”

Marla nodded. “Yep. I don’t give a shit about the rest of the multiverse. I care about two things: my city, and my body. I’m not letting the Mason walk around wearing another version of me – that Marla deserves freedom, and peace. She’s suffered more than enough.”

“But you, body-thief,” the Mason said, smiling at Rondeau. “You deserve nothing. Or so Marla says. Besides, I want you. As a host, you have definite advantages over this one. Your will is strong enough to sustain me, if not as strong as my Marla’s – but most importantly, that will of yours currently inhabits the body of a psychic powerful enough to rip holes in the skin of reality. So I’m going to take over your body, and take Marla’s cloak, and rip a portal back to my universe, and from there… conquer the multiverse.” She glanced at Marla. “Excepting this world, of course. As agreed.”

Rondeau tried to stand up, but he couldn’t move – the Mason had cast some paralyzing hoodoo on him, but he could still talk, probably because the Mason was the type who liked hearing her victims scream. “This is bullshit. Marla, you can’t trust her! She says she’ll leave this world alone, but how can you know –”

“I can’t know,” Marla said. “Even if we cast a circle of binding, who knows if compulsive magic like that even works on her? But what’s the alternative? The multiverse is vast. I have to believe she’ll be able to keep herself occupied in all those zillions of worlds without coming back here.”

“I don’t usually bother to keep promises,” the Mason said. “But in this case, I’ve made an exception, because you have something of great value to me. In the near-infinity of worlds to conquer, I won’t even notice this one. Besides, once I take the cloak away…” She shrugged. “There’s nothing else here I want. And there are billions of universes with other cloaks I can gather. I’ll leave, and I won’t come back.”

“So how do we do this?” Marla said. “I’m assuming you can’t take yourself off your own shoulders and put you on Rondeau? And I’m also guessing you don’t trust me to do the transfer, since it’s pretty much the only time you’re even remotely vulnerable. I guess that means you need a lapdog to undress you.” She looked around. “So where’s Crapsey?”

The Mason shook her head. “As if I’d trust him not to drop me to the ground and stomp on me. I went out and procured a mind-slave this morning.” She snapped her fingers, and a gray-bearded man dressed in multiple layers of flannel emerged from a utility closet, walking jerkily, eyes glazed over. Rondeau recognized him as one of the local panhandlers. He drooled and stared glassily, stopping near the bar and waiting like a switched-off robot.

The Mason made a vague gesture with her hand, and Marla grunted. Through gritted teeth, she said, “What. The fuck. Is this?”

“You could call it betrayal,” the Mason said. “I just call it a reasonable precaution. I can’t have you killing my mind-slave while I’m vulnerable and interrupting the transfer. And I know you’d be tempted.” She came over to Marla and gently removed the cloak from her shoulders, then draped it over a barstool and gazed down at it lovingly for a moment. Then she looked back up at Marla. “Though it’s a betrayal, too, actually. I’m not planning to give up this body, of course. I’m trading up to the delicious Rondeau/Bradley hybrid over there, but this body is already so beautifully broken-in, I can’t let it go to waste. After I’ve changed hosts, I’m going to take the cloak that once graced your shoulders and place it over this body’s shoulders. And then the two of us – the two of me – will go on our way, to live happily ever after for eternity. Don’t worry. Your paralysis will wear off soon. And I’ll even leave your world behind, as I promised. This place really is irrelevant to me, once I’ve taken what I want.” The Mason snapped her fingers, and her mind-slave shuffled over.

Marla widened her eyes, and Rondeau tried to nod, and couldn’t. He wasn’t the best strategist, but there was only one thing he could do to stop the Mason from possessing his body. He was very glad he hadn’t revealed his power to jump at will. He’d been tempted, when he thought he might need to prove his value to the Mason to keep her from turning him into pâté, but it was the secret that was going to save their lives.

The Mason unhooked the plain metal clasp that held her cloak fastened, and the mind-slave removed the cloak from her shoulders. When the cloak pulled away, the young-looking version of Marla collapsed, eyes rolling back in her head. The mind-slave shuffled over toward Rondeau, holding the cloak in both hands, and Marla shouted, “Now! Go now!”

Rondeau hadn’t really needed the prompting. He left his body – the trick the Mason didn’t know he could perform – and spiraled up into the air, and then –

Tried to figure out what the fuck to do. He wasn’t sure how long he could survive without a host body, but he didn’t think it was long. Even though he had the panic under control, being out of a body wasn’t a comfortable thing, and the forms down there called to him: Marla Prime on the barstool, Beta-Marla on the floor, the homeless guy who was draping the cloak on the shoulders of Rondeau’s now-empty body, which slumped on the bar as if fallen asleep over a whiskey. The body didn’t move, even after the cloak was fastened. Without Rondeau’s will to animate it, the body might as well have been a mannequin in a department store, and was just as useless to the Mason.

Rondeau tried to sort of tread water up there in the air, but he had to go somewhere, this was like drowning, and he couldn’t hold his metaphysical breath forever. He started toward the fallen Beta-Marla, thinking her body was the best bet, she had to be basically brain dead anyway, but when he tried to take over her body he bounced off, it was just like the time in the pit at Camp Kimke, she was magically impregnable. Then she started crawling away, which meant there was still a mind in there, a version of Marla’s mind, so it was almost lucky he hadn’t been able to –

But that only left the poor homeless guy. He needed to be neutralized anyway, especially since he was in the process of trying to put the other cloak on Beta-Marla, hindered by the fact that she was trying to crawl away. Rondeau had no idea if the mind slave’s consciousness had been totally scoured by the Mason’s magic or if he’d merely been placed under a compulsion, which meant this might be a murder, but there was no choice – if Rondeau didn’t stop the slave, the cloak would take over Beta-Marla and they’d be fucked all over again.

He slid into the mind-slave’s body, and felt the kick and struggle of a soul inside, but Rondeau won. Which brought his tally of annihilated human souls to three. One by accident; one in self-defense; and one… one a simple murder of expediency. Arguably he’d consigned this homeless man’s soul to oblivion in order to save the world – all the worlds – but he wasn’t sure that would help him sleep at night.

Rondeau threw the cloak in his hands down on the ground and knelt beside the crawling Beta-Marla. “Hey,” he said in the new body’s voice, though his lips were parched and his throat dry, and the craving for wine was almost incomprehensibly strong. “Hey, it’s okay, I’m not – no one’s going to hurt you again. Okay?”

Beta Marla just whimpered and kept dragging herself away, as if she’d forgotten how to stand up and use her own legs – which, maybe, she had.

“Leave her for now,” Marla said. “I don’t think she’ll get far.” She rocked a little on her stool, then scowled. “Shit, I’m still paralyzed. It’s wearing off, but not quickly enough. Can you get the cloak off your body’s shoulders? It makes me nervous seeing it on somebody, even an empty somebody.”

Rondeau removed the Mason’s cloak – the Mason – from his body’s shoulders and draped it over a stool. Then he jumped back into his old host, letting the mind slave’s body collapse. The homeless man began convulsing in a seizure, then lay still. Rondeau turned away and vomited up the coffee and stale bagels he’d had for lunch. “Fuck,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Fuck, Marla. What if the Mason hadn’t brought in that poor old guy to do the transfer? If it had been Crapsey here instead? What body would I have taken then?”

“I figured you’d take over poor Beta-Marla there. And if you couldn’t, if the Mason had protective magics on her –

“Which she did,” Rondeau said.

“Well, then.” Marla shrugged. “I assumed you’d take over my body. That’s what I was going to tell you on the phone, last night – that if you needed to steal my body to stop the Mason, you had my permission, as long as you promised not to have too much skanky sex with it afterward.” She shivered, and slid off the stool, but the paralysis was fading enough for her to catch herself. “We did it, Rondeau. We won. I figured out what the bitch wanted, and promised to give it to her, and tricked her. Hell, you tricked her. I’m just glad her knowledge was out of date – thinking I hated you, and thinking you hadn’t learned any new tricks.”

“We got lucky, Marla.”

“Some people say it’s better to be lucky than good. I try to be both, whenever possible.”

Rondeau nodded. “I was really expecting more of an epic giant battle, though. The two of you demolishing whole city blocks and knocking over skyscrapers as you raged across Felport.”

Marla laughed. “Would’ve been fun, I guess. But people kept telling me if I tried to fight the Mason, she’d just kill me. I finally started believing them. I like face-punching, but I’m not suicidal. If I’m going to die, it’s going to be for a cause. But godsdamn I’m glad I didn’t have to die this time.”

“That guy did.” Rondeau inclined his head toward the mind-slave.

Marla nodded. “He was dead the minute the Mason decided she had a use for him, Rondeau. She wouldn’t have kept him around afterward. You know that.”

Rondeau didn’t know any such thing – he figured the Mason would have just left the guy with a big hole in his memory, because why bother killing someone so insignificant? – but he appreciated Marla’s effort to make him feel better. “So now what?” he said.

“First, we get the other version of me into bed, preferably sedated, until we can figure out what’s best for her. I’m going to call Langford and get him over here to check her out. After that – we’ll take those two cloaks, stick them in a couple of garbage bags, and take them for a walk in the park.”

#

“So you’re like all the Bradley Bowmans?” Rondeau said, after grabbing the new Alpha-and-Omega B. in his arms for a ribcage-crushing hug.

“All the ones who were alive when I took this job,” he said, grinning. “More than enough, believe me. Gods, Rondeau, the shit you and me got up to in some of those worlds…” He looked past Rondeau at Marla, and his face became serious. “Do you have them?”

“Individually wrapped.” Marla showed him the two green garbage bags. “I didn’t put them together in the same sack, because even if they’re supposedly totally dormant… why risk it? I think they have some power even when they’re inert, that they can woo or whisper or call, because I’ll be damned if I haven’t thought half a dozen times about keeping them, telling myself I’d lock them up and only hold them in reserve as an emergency measure…” She shook her head. “I’d rather believe they’re whispering at my backbrain than believe I’m that addicted to power.”

“We’ll find out when I make them disappear.” B reached out and accepted the bags. He peeked inside them, making a face. “You’re lucky you can’t see what these things really look like. Imagine a squid face-fucking a manta ray while a bunch of slime eels cheer them on. Yick.”

“Thanks for the mental image,” Rondeau said.

“Where are they going?” Marla said. “You said you’d put them somewhere safe, but…”

B bunched the tops of the bags closed. “There’s a universe where our solar system didn’t form quite the same way. Earth is a frozen iceball there, farther away from the sun. Life never developed in that place, not even bacteria, nothing. I’m going to strand one of these nasties at the north pole, and put the other one down south. I’d hurl them into the sun, but I’m afraid they won’t burn. So we’ll freeze them forever. If they can die of natural causes, they’ll have plenty of time to do so. I’ll keep one of my eleventy-billion eyes on them just in case.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Marla said. “So, uh… will we see you again?”

“I’m a busy guy now, but I’ll try to keep in touch. And I’ll be watching you.” He laughed. “Sorry, that sounded creepy – it’s more that watching is my function. Just, Marla… don’t go fucking with the fabric of space-time again, all right? I’ve sewn up all the holes you made, but with Rondeau’s help you could tear more, and… don’t, please? Some things are off limits for a reason.”

“Witch’s honor,” Marla said. She stretched, and yawned. “It’s nice to be home. Now I want to get some sleep.”

“I don’t have to sleep any more,” B said. “And the best part about that is, no more of those dreams filling my head with cryptic nightmares.” He paused. “I will miss the sex dreams, though.”

“You kidding?” Rondeau said. “You can see into every possible universe. It’s like an entire infinite universe of free porn. A voyeur’s dream. You should get a video camera.”

Bradley Bowman, linchpin of the universe, laughed, hugged his friends, and then disappeared, taking the cloaks with him.

“Now you’re down an artifact, Marla. That kinda sucks.”

She grinned. “Not really. See, I have my dagger of office… and now I have the Mason’s, too.” She held up both daggers. “The Mason’s knife didn’t bite me, so I think it can’t tell us apart. I’m looking forward to dual-wielding these little darlings. You would not want to be the next thing to pick a fight with me.” Marla tucked the blades away, took Rondeau’s arm, and strolled out of the park.

They were almost to the gate when her cell phone rang. She sighed and answered. “Yeah?”

“Marla, it’s Hamil. The council has called an emergency session. Come to my penthouse, please.”

“The council? What, you mean you and the Chamberlain? Look, I know she’s pushy, but just tell her I’m pretty exhausted from saving the city, and I’m going to take a nap. We can talk tomorrow –”

“Marla.” Hamil’s voice had steel in it. “This is not a request. The council is meeting. You will be present… or decisions will be made in your absence.”

“What’s this all about –” she began, but Hamil hung up.

“What’s up?” Rondeau said.

“Apparently,” Marla replied, “I’m not done kicking ass for the day.”

Rondeau and Crapsey were just about to break out the good Scotch when Marla came stumbling down the stairs in a half-fall, half-run. Her eyes were wide, her cloak white and fluttering behind her as she bent over and vomited onto the club’s shiny floor.

“Crapsey!” the Mason boomed from the top of the stairs. “Take her! Take her now!”

“I’m trying!” Crapsey shouted. “It’s not working!”

“Yeah,” Rondeau said, not getting up from his bar stool. “That’d be the fixative. I slipped it into your coffee. Sorry about that, dude. You’re just too damn scary otherwise. Thanks for being so overconfident that you actually drank the stuff though. Plan B involved me slipping some into a drink you made yourself, and for Plan C? I had to spray some in your eyes or some other mucous membranes.” He placed a glass vial on the bar before him, muttered a command word, and winced while his backup supply of the fixative consumed itself in a white-hot flash, leaving behind a puff of acrid smoke and burn scar on the bartop. “I wasn’t looking forward –”

Crapsey grabbed his lapels. “What? What did you do to me?”

The Mason leapt down the stairs in full fury, shadows writhing around her body like the ghosts of pissed-off snakes, lightning crackling from her fingers, smoke rising from her eyes. Marla looked over her shoulder, cast a glance at Rondeau that could only be called stricken, and then –

Teleported away. Just gouged a hole in the air and stepped through it. Leaving Rondeau here in the belly of the beast.

Insofar as there had been a plan, abandoning him to these monsters had not been part of it. “Oh fuck,” Rondeau said, just as Crapsey shook him again and said, “What. The. Fuck!”

The Mason’s shadows vanished, and though his head was jostling from Crapsey’s assault, Rondeau got his first good look at her. Yee-ow. Beautiful and scary, like the statue of a death goddess come to life. Looked like young Marla if you didn’t know better. “Crapsey, your failures are usually amusing, but in this case, I am annoyed. Why didn’t you take over Marla Mason’s body? You let her get away.”

Crapsey shoved Rondeau, who fell as gracefully as he could – which wasn’t, very – and decided to just stay on the floor for the time being. Maybe these two would have an argument and he could kind of slip out through the back door while they were distracted.

“That little shit did something to me, put something in my coffee, it took my power away for a minute, I’ll be okay –”

“Ah, no,” Rondeau said from the floor. “Sorry to interrupt, but… the fixative is permanent. Guy I know named Langford came up with it, as a way to keep me bottled up and prevent me from killing anybody again by accident. It’s like a magical version of liquid glass, though he says that’s more a metaphor than literal, and… I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. It’s an impermeable whatchamacallit. Keeps your psychic parasite self inside that body. For good. But it’s not so bad, I mean, I never learned how to jump bodies on purpose and my life is still pretty awesome.” He didn’t think revealing his recently-developed ability to leap at will was a good idea. Crapsey wouldn’t take it well, and if Rondeau had learned anything from his long association with sorcerers, it was the fact that secrets are valuable.

“No. No, no, no.” Crapsey started toward him, then stopped. “Mason. Fix me. You gotta fix me. You have to –”

“I don’t think I can.” The Mason circled around him. “How curious. It’s like you’re behind glass now, Crapsey. I could break through the barrier, but… yes, the force required would kill your body, and I believe it would even kill you, the real you. If I unleashed that kind of energy, I might even be damaged, just by the blowback. Langford is very good at making things. That’s why his counterpart back home is in charge of my Wyoming Test Facility. No, I’m afraid your days of leaping from body to body are done, Crapsey.”

“So, what, I’m just stuck here? What am I supposed to –”

“Go away now, worthless thing,” the Mason said, not even looking at him.

“Boss. Come on. After all we’ve been through –”

“It is because of your years of service that I am allowing you to leave, instead of striking your body down, and leaving your consciousness trapped inside a corpse, forever.” The Mason gave a dismissive flick of her fingers. “You no longer have anything to offer me. Rondeau has turned you into nothing more than a man with a knife and a few spells and an ugly jaw. Leave me.”

“I can’t believe you and me were ever the same,” Crapsey said, spitting on Rondeau. “You fucking life-destroying piece of shit.”

“I hear that kind of thing a lot,” Rondeau said. “I’d feel worse about dicking you over this way, except, you know. You’re the evil twin. I like you and all, it was cool meeting you – but you’re a murderous sociopath, and if I hadn’t spiked your coffee, you would have killed my best friend Marla.”

“Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking,” the Mason said. Crapsey cast her a look of pure hate, and bolted from the club.

Rondeau sat up. “So. What now.”

The Mason shrugged. “Now I’m in the market for a new right hand. Are you interested?”

“Uh. What?”

“Viscarro told me that Marla hates you now, because you took the body of her friend Bradley. She forced you to open a pathway to another world, using that body’s powers, didn’t she?”

So close, and yet, so wrong. “That’s exactly right,” Rondeau said, hoping this crazy monster couldn’t read minds. Anything to keep from getting his head ripped off.

“And even after all that, after everything you did for her, Marla abandoned you. She left you here, with me. Knowing what I am. What I might do. Does that anger you?”

“It does kinda piss me off,” Rondeau said. That much was true. But even if the Mason did decapitate him, he wouldn’t die – Rondeau wasn’t pinned in by the fixative like Crapsey was, and Marla knew he was capable of escaping in a pinch, though it might mean leaving his body behind.

“Well,” the Mason said. “Wouldn’t you like to get revenge on her?”

“Tell me more,” Rondeau said.

#

Marla emerged in Fludd Park near the gazebo with a great bloody gash down her back where one of the creatures in-between had raked her with its claw – or some multi-dimensional limb that might as well have been a claw. The cloak’s healing magic began to work on her wound almost instantly, but she tore the cloak off and slung it into the dirt and stomped on it, preferring pain to the touch of the cursed cloth.

“You’re fucked up,” she told the cloak, though she wasn’t sure it could hear her. She thought – she hoped – that when no one was wearing it, the cloak was dormant, but she had her doubts. Sometimes it seemed to exert a subtle influence, even when folded in a drawer… and it had made its way to that thrift store where she found it somehow, after all. Marla looked around. “And why the fuck am I in the park? This isn’t the place I was aiming for.”

“Sorry about that.” Bradley Bowman stood in the entryway to the gazebo and gave a little wave.

Marla’s heart lurched. “Great. Now I’m going crazy. Or am I already dead? No, if I was dead, Death would be here giving me brochures about his new improved underworld. So maybe this is purgatory, or a pre-death hallucination, or what happens when you teleport but never come out the other side.”

“Or,” B said, “It’s real, and you should come sit with me. And maybe bring the cloak. Shouldn’t leave that thing where a kid could trip over it.”

Because she was short on options, Marla picked up the cloak and went up the steps. She peered at Bradley, trying to see which version of him she was hallucinating – her dead apprentice Bradley, the lost Beta-B, some aggregate? But he just looked like B.

He sat on a bench and patted the spot next to him. Marla sat down, still nauseated.

“So tell me what’s got you so upset,” he said.

“I faced the Mason.” Even if this was a hallucination, maybe talking about things would help her process, help her plan…. “She was going to attack me, so I reversed my cloak – I thought it was the only way I had a fighting chance. But the things I felt…” She shuddered. “The cloak tried to take me over, to push me down and steal my body. It always does that, but it really pushed this time. And the things it was feeling, looking across at the Mason, at its counterpart… Bradley, it felt lust. It wanted to fuck that other cloak’s brains out and make little monster parasite babies.”

“I guess that means there’s no incest taboo among the flying tentacle monsters,” B said.

Marla made a gagging motion. “I mean, they’re the same, right? How can they screw? Okay, scratch that, no offense to your gayness, of course they can screw, but how can they make babies? My cloak was sure they could breed – I don’t know if they’re hermaphrodites or if they’re able to change sex at will or if they just mingle DNA or what. Seems like inbreeding would be a bad idea, but maybe their genetics aren’t like ours.”

“They’re not like us at all,” B said. “They’re from a universe with different physical laws, more alien than any mere alien could be. They’re outsiders. I don’t know what they’re doing in this multiverse, if they got lost or exiled or what – I can’t see beyond the branches of this universe. But they’re here, and they’re your problem now… and it would be bad if they bred.”

“I know. Also: gross. The total icky barfiness I felt was what gave me the power to fight the cloak’s influence and reverse it back to white. Just like the first time I used the cloak, after I ripped off Rondeau’s jaw, I was so horrified, I wanted to help the poor kid – that’s how I got out from under its power that time. It’s a good thing the cloak keeps trying to do shit I just can’t allow. But I can’t ever put the cloak on again. I might not be able to fight it next time. The thing was in a mating frenzy, like when Spock goes into Pon Farr –”

“Star Trek reference,” B said. “Bonus points.”

“I just like Theodore Sturgeon,” Marla said. “Damn, B. It’s good to see you, even if you are a figment of my distressed mind.”

He rolled his eyes. “Marla. I’m here. And while I’m not exactly the Bradley Bowman you had as an apprentice, there are parts of me that are awfully close to him, from universes that diverged just a little bit from yours – even some universes where Bradley is still your apprentice, where you’re grooming him to take over.” He paused. “Well, except, not anymore. I’m all those Bradleys simultaneously, but that means they all had to be taken out of circulation, poof, so I’m having a lot of these conversations right now, with a lot of versions of you, though you’re the only one facing an interdimensional monster with the potential to conquer the multiverse.”

Marla thought about that. “Okay,” she said. “It’s fine. Hallucinations aren’t supposed to make sense.”

B put his hand on her knee. “Sorry. I’m still getting the hang of multiple simultaneous consciousness. Um. When the possible witch’s world started falling apart, and I stepped through that door, remember that?”

“Yeah. Duh. Not something I’m likely to forget.”

“Right. Well, when I stepped through, I met the people – but they’re not people – who run things. Or not exactly run things, but… keep things running? Like, the machinery of the universe? And it turns out they had a job opening. For, well.” He laughed. “For the possible witch. So they gave me her job.”

Marla stared at him. “You’re the possible witch? What?”

“Yeah. See, she has a job. An important job. A job she messed up really badly. And when she messed it up, she got fired, only when things like her get fired, they just cease to exist. But her function didn’t cease to exist, and I stepped into it. And when I did, every other version of Bradley Bowman got the job, too, and we squashed into a sort of composite – uh, not to sound arrogant – a composite superbeing, with all the knowledge of all our various iterations. And I can see into all the worlds, all the parallel universes, simultaneously, and be in them simultaneously, and… Here I am. I can have the opening to my realm anywhere in the universe, and I put it in this gazebo in Fludd Park. I really liked this place, when I was your apprentice.”

“You know, I thought as time went on I would get more and more powerful,” Marla said. “And instead, my friends get all the power. Gods, Bradley – I mean, you are a god, now, pretty much. So, this job – what’s the job?”

He cleared his throat. “That’s a bit of a sore point. My job is maintaining the integrity of the multiverse – which means keeping the various realities separate, among other things. You bullied the possible witch into violating the fundamental purpose of her existence, and once she opened a passageway between worlds…” He shook his head. “Major transgression. I mean, she was the protector of the multiverse the way you’re the protector of Felport. Her opening a rift in reality was like you setting the entire city on fire.

“So it’s… my fault.” Marla looked up at the stars. Every star up there existed in a functionally infinite number of other universes. That was a lot of godsdamned stars. “I made her get disappeared?”

B nodded. “Pretty big mayhem for a girl from Indiana, huh? If it makes you feel better, the possible witch’s bosses said she was getting squirrely anyway, starting to go profoundly weird. Living for countless billions of years and experiencing deep time can do that, apparently. They say I’ll probably burn out eventually, though they figure the heat death of the universes will happen first, so I’ve got time.”

“B, I just want to fix things. Trying to drag you into my world, it was stupid and selfish, I know. I didn’t know how stupid until just now, but… what can I do?”

B shrugged. “Just because I’m all-seeing doesn’t mean I’m all-knowing, Marla. Usually I can look across universes and see how different decisions played out in different places, but this is the one and only branch of the multiverse with the Mason and you inhabiting the same space.”

“What? Really? I thought new universes spawned constantly. She’s been here for days – shouldn’t there be, like, zillions of branch universes now?”

B shook his head. “When the rift happened and the possible witch got ousted, those two universes were… sequestered. Locked down by the admins of the multiverse, like a disputed entry on Wikipedia locked against editing.” Marla looked at him blankly, and he laughed. “Never mind. The point is, no more universes are branching just now. The powers that be can’t keep these worlds locked down for long, because when they do stuff like that, a pretty hellacious strain builds up in the structure of the multiverse. If you don’t stop the Mason soon, she’ll find a way to tear more holes in reality – using Rondeau and his psychic abilities, along with her own terrible power, to do the job. She can accomplish almost anything she sets her mind to, magically speaking, and now that she knows there are other worlds, she won’t stop until she’s broken through into them – and if she does that too often, the whole multiverse will fall. Not because she’ll conquer it, but because once the walls start to break down, the structural integrity of reality will falter, and the universes will crash together and try to inhabit the same space. And when billions and billions of stars and planets start trying to inhabit the same space?”

“Big boom,” Marla said.

“Big crunch,” B said. “Now, I can seal up rifts with a little work, it’s part of my gig, but it won’t help if she keeps ripping new ones, which she will. So stop her. Get the cloak off her. Bring the cloaks to me, and I’ll put them someplace they can’t do any harm.”

“But how?” Marla said.

“I know you like brute force, but you taught me, when you can’t punch your way through a problem, you can think your way through it.” He winced. “I really gotta go. There are emergencies I need to tend to that need more than this fragmentary attention. I wish I had time to tell you, like, a billion things, but I can give you a little bit of insight before I take off, since I can spy on anything and everything: the Mason thinks you still hate Rondeau’s guts for stealing my body. She thinks that’s why you teleported away without trying to save him just now – because you don’t care if he dies.”

“Oh,” Marla said. “Oh. I didn’t leave Rondeau because I was pissed at him – I was just freaked out about feeling horny for a space monster, and Rondeau’s an unkillable parasite who can take care of himself. Besides, teleporting is dangerous, I wouldn’t want to drag him with me and risk getting him lost.”

“Well, the Mason’s not killing him – she’s trying to recruit him. She figures, if you hate him, maybe he’ll come work for her.” B shook his head. “The Mason has known Crapsey too long. She doesn’t get that Rondeau’s approach to loyalty is a lot different. Maybe that’ll give you an edge? A secret double agent on the inside?”

“Maybe. Huh. I wonder if the Mason –”

But B was gone, without even the courtesy of a puff of smoke to mark his disappearance. Off preserving the integrity of the multiverse or something, no doubt. “He’s gonna be insufferable,” Marla said. “Bad enough he used to be a movie star, now he has to be master of space-time too?”

She stood up, and lifted the cloak in both her hands. “You and me, cloak. One last play. Let’s go save the stupid universe.”

#

“I’ll teach you to jump bodies,” the Mason was saying, lounging on Marla’s couch. “It’ll be great fun. For me. It will be quite terrible for you.”

Rondeau was spared having to answer when the phone on Marla’s desk rang.

“Answer it, lackey,” the Mason said, and Rondeau picked it up.

“Hey, you,” Marla said. “I’ve got a plan. Doubt I have time to give you the details, but here’s the main thing you need to know –”

“Who is it?” the Mason demanded.

“Uh,” Rondeau said. “It’s Marla.”

The Mason snatched the phone out of his hand. “Marla. Are you willing to come back and face your fate, or will I have to start tearing your city into little pieces?”

Rondeau watched her face, but it didn’t give much away.

“Oh, very well,” the Mason said. “I don’t see the point in anything less than unconditional surrender, but –”

A longer pause this time, and then the Mason smiled. She looked at Rondeau like he was a pork chop on a plate. “That is an intriguing proposal, Marla. I think… yes, certainly. Come over this afternoon. We’ll discuss it further then.”

She hung up the phone and stared at a spot on the wall for about two minutes straight before Rondeau coughed and said, “Uh, so what’s going on?”

“I’m going to get everything I’ve always dreamed of,” the Mason said, still staring at nothing. “I’ve always wanted a big family. Haven’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I mean, the planet’s so overpopulated anyway –”

“It won’t be for much longer,” the Mason said, and Rondeau didn’t really have an answer for that, so he went and made himself a very large drink instead, and tried to imagine what Marla’s plan could possibly be.

“Mmm. Your terms are acceptable. I’ll see you then. I look forward to our conversation. I don’t usually talk to insects before killing them, but I’m curious –” The Mason frowned, held the phone away, and looked at it for a moment. “The woman hung up on me.” She placed the phone back down on Marla’s desk.

“Some people are so rude.” Crapsey sprawled on the couch with his arm thrown over his face. “No wonder you want to exterminate all sentient life.” After they broke into Rondeau’s nightclub – which had pretty insane magical security, but nothing the Mason couldn’t circumvent – he’d taken a shower in Rondeau’s cramped bathroom and scrounged up clean boxers and a comfortably worn bathrobe. Wearing another man’s underpants was kind of weird, but since the other man was just another iteration of himself, Crapsey decided it was okay. The next step in his plan was to curl up in Rondeau’s surprisingly neat bedroom and sleep, but he’d wanted to stay awake for the Mason’s last murder of the day. The phone call from Marla had interrupted the fun. “So Marla’s back in this universe? Is she coming over? If so, I’m gonna need some of those uppers we talked about, because I am beat like a disobedient gimp.”

“No. She wants to meet in the morning, in the conference room downstairs – the one with the anti-magical properties. As if I’d be stupid enough…” The Mason’s mouth quirked slightly in what might have been a smile on another face. “She says they’ll bring the coffee, but we’re in charge of bringing the bagels.”

“Ha,” Crapsey said. “Gotta admire the chutzpah. So what’s the plan?”

“I will speak with her. I am curious about many things – mainly how she resisted the cloak’s power, and how she travels from world to world. If she has the cloak, we will kill her when I’ve finished speaking to her, and take it away. If she does not, we will torture her until she tells me its location.”

“Torture? You know torture’s no good for getting useful intelligence out of people, boss. Besides, you can set up a ritual to rifle through the contents of her mind, right? I mean, I know that can destroy her mind in the process, but I don’t get the sense that’s a problem for you.”

“Of course. All true. But I enjoy torture.” She slid back in her chair. “But executions also have their place.” She began tugging on the drawers in Marla’s desk. “Ah,” the Mason said, sliding out the bottom drawer on the left. “Come look at this.”

Crapsey groaned and pushed himself up off the couch. The Mason had cured his major injuries in the park, but plain old muscle soreness remained, though he knew she could’ve fixed that too if she wanted.

The drawer in Marla’s desk was less a drawer and more a black iron safe on rollers, the lid etched and filigreed with designs that twisted like optical illusions viewed on hallucinogens. “Very potent,” the Mason said. “As well-fortified as Viscarro’s own vaults. In effect, it is his personal vault, rendered in miniature. Beautiful work. Viscarro had a reputation as nothing more than a hoarder, a stealer of magic crafted by more talented hands, but his skills in certain areas were impressive.”

The Mason drew her dagger of office and began cutting into the drawer like she was opening a can of creamed corn. Once she’d sliced through the metal, she prised up the lid and tossed it to the floor with a dull thunk. Crapsey and the Mason peered into the small space revealed.

“That’s disappointing,” the Mason said. “I’d hoped she might keep the cloak here.” She leaned her face close to the drawer, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. “And she does, though not now. I suppose she took it with her when she went off to our world. ”

“At least we know she didn’t put it in a box and send it off to get buried at the top of a mountain.” He nodded toward the drawer. “So I figure the wooden box probably has Viscarro’s phylactery in it, right?”

“Yes.”

“And what about the little silver bell?”

The Mason shrugged. “There is nothing magical about it at all. It’s just a bell. I can’t imagine why she put it in here, unless it has… what do you people call it? Some kind of value?”

“Sentimental value. And watch the ‘you people’ stuff. I’m an inhuman monstrous parasite too, you know.”

“Noted.” She removed the little teakwood box and set it on the desk, flipped open the lid, and revealed the faintly glowing pebble-sized red gem inside. “There. Just like it was in my world. Viscarro’s life. If an ordinary person touched this object, Viscarro’s personality would rush in and try to take control. Of course, that doesn’t work on me.” The Mason lifted out the gem, and the dim light inside brightened and began to flicker more rapidly. “That’s him trying to take me over. I’ve never been sure whether he can hear me in there, if he’s conscious, but if he is…” She put the gem close to her lips. “Viscarro. I’m killing you. For the second time. But this time, I’m going to devour your soul.”

The Mason dropped the gem on the desk blotter, held her dagger of office like a chef’s knife, and began to dice up the gem as if mincing a clove of garlic. Her hand moved in a blur, and within seconds the gem was reduced to a fine pink powder. The Mason scooped up a pile of the powder on the edge of her knife blade. “Here goes.” She raised the blade to her nose, pressed one nostril shut with her free hand, and snorted the powdered phylactery of Leland Viscarro.

She closed her eyes, leaned back in the chair, shivered all over, and released a long, slow sigh.

“Damn, boss. Seems pretty nice. Can I get a hit of that?”

“Your puny mind couldn’t bear it.” The Mason’s voice was serene. “Oh, oh, oh, this is so interesting. Viscarro was always a collector of secrets, and now I know them all. His entire life’s essence is dissolving into my mind like a spoonful of sugar into a cup of hot tea.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Ha. Many things. Most have no bearing on our present situation, but… according to Viscarro’s sources, Marla Mason despises Rondeau for murdering her little friend Bradley Bowman and stealing his body. Apparently she forced Rondeau into exile – he’s been living at the Blackwing Institute. Viscarro was quite confused when Marla and Rondeau – as he believed us to be – attacked him, because he thought they were firmly on the outs.”

Crapsey frowned. “But Hamil said Marla took Rondeau with her to the other world. Sworn enemies don’t usually travel together.”

“Hamil also said he wasn’t sure how Marla managed to go from one world to another… and it stands to reason that Rondeau had something to do with that passage. She’d travel with an enemy if he was the only means of transportation.”

Crapsey grinned. “So you’re saying I’ve got undiscovered badass reality-destroying powers?”

The Mason snorted. “Hardly. Rondeau is in Bradley Bowman’s body, remember, and by all accounts, Bowman is a powerful psychic and oracle generator. Perhaps he can summon some sort of being that opens a passage.” She sighed. “If I’m right, that means I’ll need to procure Rondeau’s services in order to access the multiverse. Once he realizes the alternative is a hell of endless pain, I’m sure he’ll agree to work for me.”

“Cool,” Crapsey said. “Bringing Rondeau over to our side will be sweet. Somebody to play cards with. And, you know, steal bodies with.”

The Mason shook her head. “According to Viscarro, Rondeau can’t possess anyone voluntarily. He’s only done it once that he remembers, quite accidentally, when he murdered Bradley Bowman. What a waste of talent – but Rondeau never had me to teach him, of course.”

Crapsey nodded. “He’s probably a lot less bitter and fucked-up than I am, then. The beatings, and screaming, and being locked in a dark windowless box with no food and water until I managed to leave my body – that stuff left the kind of marks you can’t see by looking.”

“Made you stronger,” the Mason said simply, and then snorted the rest of the powdered Viscarro. “Mmm. He knows a bit about Marla’s history, but not much – he didn’t pay attention to her until after she’d acquired the cloak, when she left her apprenticeship with Artie Mann and began working as a mercenary. How did she end up working for the pornomancer instead of the spider? What single point of divergence could have led to such different outcomes?”

Crapsey yawned. “If you’re going to get all musing and rhetorical, can I go?”

The Mason nodded. “You should sleep. But sleep lightly. It’s possible Marla will stage a surprise attack in the night.”

“As long as she doesn’t interrupt any good sex dreams,” Crapsey said, and shuffled off to bed.

#

“You sure wearing the cloak is a good idea?” Rondeau climbed out of the car they’d borrowed from Langford, balancing a cardboard tray holding four take-out coffees.

“I need every edge I can get.”

“So do we knock, or…” Rondeau squinted in the bright morning sun as they stood before the door to his club.

“Screw that. It’s your place.” Marla went to the door and pressed her palm against it, disengaging the magical lock –the Mason had circumvented the lock without breaking it, showing an annoyingly deft hand – and pushing it open.

Someone was waiting in the dim club, leaning against one of the load-bearing pillars scattered at irregular intervals around the dance floor. “Good morning,” Crapsey said. He stepped into the illumination of the house lights and grinned. He was wearing one of Rondeau’s purple zoot suits – tight across the shoulders, but it basically fit – and yet, the outfit wasn’t the most striking thing about him.

“Bro, that jaw is sick,” Rondeau said. “When I got my jaw repaired, I just got stupid flesh and bone. What are those, like fangs?”

Crapsey kept grinning, but this time, he looked like he meant it. “I can bite through freaking steel, dude. Steel tastes lousy, but still. How come you still look like me – you – us? Didn’t you steal a new body?”

“Yeah, but I got an illusion to keep my old look, because sure, Bradley Bowman was a movie star, but that doesn’t mean he looked better than me. I’m stuck wearing these boring-ass borrowed clothes, but since you raided my closet, you can see I’ve got better fashion sense than this.”

“Your threads are sweet,” Crapsey said. “You could use a little bulking up, though. Hit the gym every once in a while.”

“Don’t those steroids shrink your balls?” Rondeau said.

Crapsey winked. “They’re still plenty big though. You should know.”

“Two Rondeaus,” Marla muttered. “Gods save me.”

Crapsey looked her up and down. “I’ll never get used to seeing the cloak in white. Just looks wrong to me.”

“Fascinating,” Marla said. “Where’s the purple bitch?”

Crapsey jerked his head toward the stairs. “Up in your office.”

“Not in the conference room?”

Crapsey laughed. “You kidding? She spent the night erecting magical barriers and fields to make entering that room totally impossible.” The conference room was a magical dead-zone, and Marla knew from experience the cloak didn’t work in there – if the Mason stepped inside, the battle would have been over before it began. “I mean, Marla, we are from Felport. We’ve got one of those rooms on our side, too.”

“Worth a try,” Marla said. She’d never expected the Mason to enter the room, but she was hoping the ploy would make them underestimate her. And, hell, it had been worth a try. “Did she at least get bagels?”

“Ha. You kinda remind me of the boss. Yeah, I fetched bagels, they’re up there, a nice little variety on a tray and everything. She won’t eat any – she barely eats at all, and when she does, she likes meat – but you can help yourself. Is one of those coffees for me?”

“Sure.” Rondeau passed him one of the cups.

Crapsey took it, lifted the lid, and sniffed. “I guess I should ask if it’s poisoned?”

Rondeau didn’t let himself stiffen or grimace or wince. He shrugged instead. “You can ask.”

“But it’s a stupid question,” Crapsey said. “Since poisoning me would just annoy me and make me take over Marla’s body, and neither of you wants that. Is there sugar in this?”

“No.” Marla shook her head. “Rondeau said you’d want like ten sugars, the same way he likes it, but I said you’re from a totally different world –”

Rondeau wordlessly took a wad of sugar packets from his pocket and passed them to Crapsey, who nodded and walked over to the bar and began methodically ripping open the packets and dumping the contents into his cup.

Marla rolled her eyes. Rondeau handed her two of the coffee cups and said, “See you when you get done.”

“If shit gets crazy, you run,” Marla said. “All right?”

“Don’t worry about him,” Crapsey called. “He’s like another me, and I’m a major fan of me, so he’ll be all right. You, though…” He shrugged. “I’m sure you and the boss have lots to talk about. Rondeau, come over here and let’s shoot the shit, what do you say?”

“Planning to pump me for information on behalf of your evil overlord?” Rondeau said, strolling over and taking a bar stool next to him.

“I was thinking more about comparing sexual conquests,” Crapsey replied. Then he took his first sip of the coffee Rondeau had prepared for him, and doomed himself.

#

Marla stepped into her office and shut the door behind her. The Mason was seated behind her desk, face shaded by the hood of her purple cloak. Marla put the coffee cups down on the desk, slid one toward the Mason, and picked up a plain bagel. She sliced it in half with her dagger of office, glanced around, and sighed. “No shmear? No lox? You world-devouring monsters are cheap.” She sat down in one of the crappy visitor chairs, took a bite of the bagel, chewed for a moment, then decided she’d have to make the opening move, since the Mason wasn’t moving at all. “All right, let’s get a look at you.”

The Mason leaned forward and pushed her hood back, and the face revealed wasn’t much at all like the one Marla saw in the mirror, really, despite certain broad similarities.

“Gods,” Marla said. “Was I ever that young? I know my skin was never that smooth. Don’t you have any pores?”

“I’ve kept this body in the prime of its physical perfection.” The Mason’s voice was curiously flat, but Marla was relieved it didn’t sound like the voice of the cloak in her own head. “You should be jealous.”

“Yeah, because never changing at all is totally awesome. So. You murdered half my council.”

The Mason nodded. “So far.”

“But you wanted to have a little chat with me before taking your punishment? Here I am. What do you want?”

The Mason laced her hands together on the desk. “Tell me, Marla. How did you like my world during your visit?”

Marla shrugged. “Didn’t see much evidence of you there. Looked like a big Jaguar god was in charge to me.” She started to lace her own hands together, caught herself, and settled for cracking her knuckles instead. “Of course, I killed the Jaguar. He was bothering my friends.”

The Mason raised one eyebrow. “You defeated Teyepollotl? My, my. I had that penciled in for the winter. Thank you for sparing me the trouble. Now I only have to roll up Sanford Cole and his ragtag band of rags and tags, which will be much simpler.”

“You’re never going back there. This world is your last stop. Today is your last day.”

“Such confidence! What if I attacked you now? Stabbed you with a knife?”

“I’ve got a knife too, lady. And a cloak, in case you didn’t notice.”

The Mason nodded. “Yes. The cloak. How long have you had it?”

“I’m supposed to answer your questions now?”

“Unless you’d rather begin trying to kill one another.”

“Tempting… but okay. I’ll play.” Marla was curious, too – why had this alternate version of herself been so weak and fucked-up that she’d allowed herself to be dominated by a haunted bit of Renaissance Faire costuming? “I found the cloak in a thrift store on my twentieth birthday. Just felt… drawn to it. So I bought it for myself as a present.” In truth, the memory of that day was kind of vague, like any memory a dozen years old would be – had she been at the store alone, or with a friend? She couldn’t recall, but it didn’t really matter. “I tried it on, and it healed, my, ah…”

“Infected rat bite,” the Mason said. “Yes, I cured the same thing for this version of –”

“Uh. No. I had a urinary tract infection. From too much dirty teenage fucking, I guess. You’re saying Beta-Marla over there got bitten by rats? That’s messed up.”

“The divergence point between our worlds is obviously much earlier,” the Mason said. “You were an apprentice to Artie Mann.”

“You weren’t?”

“Viscarro was my master,” the Mason said. “I was just one of many apprentices. He took no particular notice of me – of Marla, I mean, but for convenience, I will say ‘I.’ It’s easier, since my host’s memories feel like my own.”

Her host. Marla fought back the urge to tear her own cloak off her back. This is what the cloak wanted to do – make her into a conveyance for a pompous alien shitbag. No amount of ass-kicking power was worth that risk.

The Mason went on. “I don’t think Viscarro had any opinion about me, until I found the cloak. I was just part of the scenery, though the way I joined his service was… peculiar. When I first came to Felport, I was hungry – starving – and I saw a young man hurrying alone down an alleyway carrying grocery bags. I struck him over the head with a brick and stole his bags. I expected food. Instead there were golden eggs, nestled in straw. The boy I killed was one of Viscarro’s apprentices, a courier, delivering some magical items. Viscarro’s people found me later, and made me an offer: I could die, or I could take over the route of the courier I’d killed. I got the sense they were terribly overworked, and I never knew if Viscarro had authorized the offer, sensing something formidable in me – or if the apprentices had just decided to spare themselves the trouble of taking over the dead boy’s route and recruited me on their own authority.” She shrugged. “Such was my introduction to the hidden world. I learned what magic I could – apprentices have a great deal of freedom in the Bank of the Catacombs to study ancient texts and explore – and we all taught ourselves a little, and occasionally Viscarro would conduct a lecture or a series of tests to weed out the weak. It was a hard life, but I made friends, of a sort. I did not have any… filthy teenage sex, though. I – this Marla – found the idea of human intimacy almost as repulsive as I do.”

“Okay, table that for a minute.” Marla had taken on the role of interviewer, somehow, but she didn’t mind. Apparently the Mason really wanted to tell her story – or maybe some vestige of Beta-Marla, inside the Mason, did. “What happened when you found the cloak?”

“I put it on, and my rat bite was cured. So I stole the cloak from the shop. I thought the artifact was my ticket to becoming Viscarro’s right hand – that once he saw what I possessed, he would take me seriously, and teach me.” She scowled. “Instead, as soon as he saw the cloak, he said it was his. That as an apprentice, I had no right to property, that I had no self. I was merely an extension of his will, and I would hand over the cloak immediately, and he would have me beaten for daring to suggest I could own such a thing.”

Marla nodded. “And let me guess. A little voice way down inside you whispered the word –”

“‘Turn.’ And the cloak turned. To the purple. I killed Viscarro – well, his body. Truly killing him happened a little later. And then I went out walking, in the flush of my new power, and it was glorious. All fear gone. Never again would I be ordered around. Never again would I be touched against my will. Never again would I suffer any humiliation. Then I saw an interesting little boy, who wasn’t a little boy at all, and ripped off his jaw to use for an oracle. Eventually I renamed that little boy Crapsey, and made him my apprentice, of a sort. I’m not a very nice master, but I’m no worse than Viscarro was.” The Mason shrugged. “From there, I plotted my rise to power, and everything went well until you tried to save your dead friend Bradley Bowman and brought me here.”

“Yeah. I’m starting to think that was a mistake. It’s okay. Everyone’s allowed to make one mistake in a lifetime, right? That was mine. So. Let’s trace this shit back. You ran away from home in Indiana and made your way to Felport, right?”

The Mason nodded.

“But you didn’t get a job working as a topless waitress? That’s how I met Artie Mann.”

The Mason shuddered. “A place where men would… ogle? Grope? No, no, I would never.”

“Okay, but why? What happened to make you so freaked about sex?” Marla had certainly had brushes with creepiness in her youth, including a boy who’d assaulted one of her friends and tried unsuccessfully to come after Marla. And of course her mom’s various drunk boyfriends had made passes at her, at least until her brother Jason had his little talks with them, usually helped by his friend Mr. Baseball Bat.

“You don’t remember uncle Devlin?” the Mason said.

Marla frowned. “My mom didn’t have any brothers, not in this world –”

The Mason shook her head. “Not a real uncle. Mom’s boyfriend. He… did things. To me. To Marla.”

Devlin. Devlin? There’d been a guy, maybe… “Sideburns? Truck driver? Except maybe an out-of-work truck driver?”

The Mason nodded. “Yes. He lived with us for many years, in the trailer, and every night after mom drank herself to sleep…” She shuddered. More and more of the other Marla was showing through. The Mason was having trouble separating herself from her host, it looked like.

“I remember some kind of big fight, I was only maybe eight? My mom and my brother Jason screaming at each other, Jason was only eleven or twelve but he was saying the guy had to go, if he didn’t leave forever Jason was going to burn the whole house down –”

“Your brother?” the Mason said. “Jason?”

“Yeah. He’s an asshole now, sure, but when we were kids he was the great protector, I never found out until later all the stuff he did for me, and he could play mom like a violin, never had any trouble making her do whatever he…” Marla trailed off. The Mason looked stunned.

“In my world,” the Mason said, “Jason was playing in the yard one day when a drunk driver lost control of his car and veered off the road onto the grass. Jason was struck and killed. He was four or five years old. I – Marla – was just an infant.”

Marla stared. Her brother, who’d shot Rondeau in the gut and thus indirectly killed Bradley Bowman; who’d embroiled her in a scam that ended in the death of an innocent, if hapless, millionaire; who’d never forgiven her for refusing to help him cover up a murder he’d committed as a teenager; who’d not so very long ago shot and tried to kill Marla herself, an attempt that would have succeeded if the cloak she was wearing now hadn’t healed her injuries…

Jason was the divergence point. He was the one who’d made all the difference. Because before he’d become a heartless con artist, he’d been a big brother, doing his best to take care of his little sister. He’d taught Marla to fight, and to scam, and to survive, and to be strong in herself. And he’d kept her from being repeatedly molested by a drunk out-of-work trucker, it seemed.

Without Jason, she would have had all the same anger, the same hunger for knowledge, the same bull-headednes, the same will she possessed now, but without the skills to cope with those feelings and direct them toward achieving her own ambitions.

Without Jason, Marla would have been the kind of person who put on a magical cloak that made all her decisions for her, and who thought that was a nice change.

If she ever saw her brother again, she might not try to kill him after all.

“I remember hearing about that accident,” Marla said. “Mom told the story, though Jason didn’t remember it, how he almost got killed. If the car had struck just two feet to the right, it would have landed right on top of him…” Marla reached over and touched the Mason’s hand. “You poor thing,” she said. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. It’s no wonder –”

The Mason – and it was definitely the Mason again now, all hints of humanity in her expression gone – jerked her hand back. “Don’t touch me, vermin,” she said, and drew her dagger.

Here we go, Marla thought, and – because she really didn’t think she had a chance against this psycho alien otherwise – she reversed her cloak to purple.

Less than two seconds later, she reversed it back to white, and ran away as fast as she could.

Marla removed her cloak, folded it carefully, and tucked it into her bag. Then she kicked apart the Jaguar’s throne of skulls. The bones didn’t dissolve into dust and slurry like the rest of the Jaguar’s creations, so they weren’t magical, but real skulls and bones from real dead people. That meant somebody had been forced to take the remains of the dead and actually build a big-ass chair out of them, which was a hell of a thing to have on your résumé. The mysterious chairwright had used some kind of epoxy resin to hold things together. Ah, human ingenuity.

Marla had never been very good at remote viewing – she was too firmly in-her-self, and found the notion of mind/body duality so inherently ridiculous, that leaving her body behind was tough. Still, she could imagine what was happening all over the city now. Ordinary citizens emerging from their doubtless well-barricaded apartments, watching the vines and giant snakes and impossible rivers and vicious jungle cats turn to mist and smoke and absence. People lifting their faces up to the sun, and daring to hope their lives would go back to normal again.

Well. “Normal” for a world where the existence of monsters and sorcerers was public knowledge, and where the threat of the Mason loomed just on the other side of the Rockies.

Satisfied with the results of her kicking, Marla went and found the bush where she’d ditched her grape seed and squatted down, running her hands over the soil until she found the little kernel of communication. She blew the dirt off and slipped the seed back into her ear. “Cole, you hear me?”

“Marla!” The old man’s voice was full of undisguised wonder. “You succeeded?”

“I put the cat to sleep,” she said. “How did the Alcatraz assault go?” She asked the question as nonchalantly as she could, but her stomach was a clench of knots. Bradley Bowman had died on her watch once already in one world, and if he died in another…

“Some injuries, but no casualties,” Cole said. “And they killed both Bethany and the Lynx, I’m assured.”

“Good. Saves you having to do too much mopping up, then. With both the biggest bosses dead, the Jaguar’s toadies are probably scared and hopping away as fast as they can. Should I make my way back to the camp?”

“My days of skulking in the sewers are over, Marla dear,” Cole said. “I’ll send someone ’round to pick you up, and we’ll celebrate in greater splendor.”

#

Yasuko arrived eventually on a motorcycle, and was annoyed when Marla insisted on driving it herself. “You don’t even know where we’re going!” she said.

“I don’t ride bitch even more than I don’t know where we’re going,” Marla replied. “You can give me directions. I’m a quick study.”

The drive was scenic, taking them west and south around the coast of the city along the sea cliffs. The ocean was the same as always, vast and blue and largely indifferent to the acts of people and gods. The motorcycle handled the rough roadway and buckled concrete easily, apparently ‘chanted with spells to prevent crashes, which sort of took the challenge out of things – but Marla decided she’d had enough challenges for the day.

They parked in front of the Cliff House, a multi-story Victorian wedding cake of a building perched on the cliffs above Ocean Beach, with commanding views of the sea. The building, once a restaurant, had become Sanford Cole’s base of operations before his exile. “Doesn’t this place fall down a lot?” Marla said, climbing off the bike.

“It’s burnt or collapsed or been accidentally exploded by dynamite something like five times since 1858,” Yasuko said. “When Cole took power in the city, he had the house restored to something resembling its, hmm, second incarnation, I think? But with modern conveniences inside. It’s not a bad place to work.”

“Sounds like the place is cursed, but hey, it’s your day job, not mine.”

They went through the front doors, into a great room filled with velvet-covered furniture and antique tables and the entire population of Camp Kimke, among others. Everyone cheered when Marla came in, shouting her first name and slapping her on the back as she tried to work her way deeper into the room. She scanned the space for Beta-B or Rondeau or Cole, but didn’t see them. Pie Bob pressed a glass of champagne into her hand, and Marla accepted it gratefully. She didn’t drink much, but one glass wouldn’t hurt, and god-toppling was thirsty work.

The appreciation was nice too. Despite all the times she’d saved Felport, the other sorcerers there had never shouted “Three cheers for Marla!” Mostly they’d just bitched about collateral damage and lost income. Not that she would have enjoyed parties in her honor or anything, but it would’ve been nice to have the chance to fail to enjoy them.

She made chit-chat with people as best she could – she was pretty crap at that sort of thing – until she found an unobstructed window with a good view. She stood looking out at the sea, trying to appear introspective and unapproachable as the sun bled down toward the horizon. Night was falling on the first day after the fall of the Jaguar. It would be a good night, she was sure.

“Marla.” Rondeau stood at her shoulder. “Could you come upstairs with me for a sec? Beta-B and me want you to hear something.”

Marla sighed and knocked back the last of her champagne. “What, is there a new crisis already?”

Rondeau didn’t laugh. His face was so serious it might have been the rehearsal for a death mask. “Yeah. Looks like it.”

She followed him through the crowd and up a narrow staircase to the infinitely quieter second floor, and into a small bedroom, also decorated in High Victorian. A redhead sat on the bed beside Beta-B.

“Marla, this is Anna,” Beta-B said. “She’s a seer, and the best interpreter of dreams I’ve ever met. I told her about this dream I had, and, ah… Can you tell her what you told me, Anna?”

Anna cleared her throat. “In Bradley’s dream, he saw a younger version of you in a purple cloak step out of a mirror and switch places with you, trapping you behind glass. Then all the reflections of you started to change, too, white cloaks going purple, one after another, until your cloak changed as well. It seems clear to me that it means the Mason –”

“Fuck,” Marla said. “She’s in my world?”

“It seems possible.” Cole stepped in from the hallway. “I’ve just been re-establishing contact with my agents back East, and things are chaotic there. The Mason and her lieutenant Crapsey both vanished, apparently around the same time Bradley here left for your world. They haven’t returned, and I gather her lieutenants are assassinating one another and fighting for power – it looks like the chaos witch Nicolette is winning, for now. Since Bradley went to your world, it seems possible the Mason and Crapsey did as well.”

“The possible witch said, ‘When you open a doorway, it opens both ways,'” Rondeau said. “And we never did figure out what the price was, for bringing Beta-B to our world.”

“Now we know,” Marla said, trying to get her mind to spin up to crisis-management speed. Her brain felt dipped in liquid nitrogen, though, frozen and dull. What would the Mason – and Rondeau’s murderous, promiscuously body-jumping counterpart – do, unleashed in her world?

What would they do to her city?

Anna said, “That’s not all. Bradley’s vision suggests… that the Mason is planning to try and go to other worlds. That she’s going to take over other parallel dimensions, and force other versions of you into her service.”

“That won’t happen,” Marla said. “Because I’m going to end the bitch. She does not get to play in my world. No way.”

“I’m going with you,” Beta-B said.

Marla’s numb brain warmed up a fraction. “Are you sure? You said even if we defeated the Jaguar that –”

“I needed to stay to fight the Mason,” Beta-B said. “Now she’s in your world. You came here, at great personal risk, and helped us. So I’m going to go over there and help you. If she’s planning to conquer the whole multiverse, I’ll have to deal with her again sooner or later anyway, so it might as well be now. I’m not planning to stay forever in your world, but –”

Acting on impulse, as she so often did, Marla took Beta-B in her arms and hugged him. “We’ve come a long way,” she said, “from you trying to cut off my head for a dark ritual.”

“Lord, are you ever going to let me live that down?” Beta-B said. “That was, like, a whole day ago.”

“She holds grudges like I hold my liquor,” Rondeau said. “Which is really well, in case you were wondering.”

Marla turned to Cole. “Sorry to save the city and run, but –”

“I’ll arrange our fastest transport to Alcatraz,” Cole said.

“At least we won’t get attacked by giant fucking snakes this time,” Rondeau said.

#

“Gods, you might have warned me.” Marla stared down at the corpse of the Lynx – known better to her as Joshua Kindler, who’d been her lover, briefly, and then her betrayer, and then a man dead by her hand. She shifted the strap of her shoulder bag, the cloak and dagger nestled securely inside. The man on the ground was one of the many things her artifacts had failed to protect her from.

“Yeah.” Rondeau shuffled his feet. “I, uh, wasn’t sure how to broach the subject. I know he’s kind of a sore point.”

“Just as a reminder of my capacity for stupidity. But are you okay? Having to, you know…”

“Kill somebody?” Rondeau shook his head. “I’m a multiple murderer now, you know that? Alpha-B, and Joshua, and… does the Jaguar god’s mind count?”

“He’s probably fine,” Marla said. “Back upstairs ripping out the hearts of constellations or something by now.”

“Yeah.” Rondeau nodded. “Well, only two, then, and one was an accident, and one was self-defense. I’m not saying I won’t have some fucked-up dreams, but… I’m still a long way from reaching your body count, at least.”

“Let’s keep it that way.” She beckoned Beta-B, who’d stood quietly aside during their conversation. “Are you all set?”

“Sure. It’s just passing through a wound gouged in the skin of reality itself. Nothing we haven’t done before.” He offered his hand, and she grasped it. Rondeau took her other hand, and they went into the solitary confinement cell where the opening to the possible witch’s domain was located. Not, Rondeau had assured her, the same solitary cell where the god-haunted body of Mutex had been held captive – that would’ve been a little too much coincidence for comfort.

They stepped into the possible witch’s domain. Beta-B shouted and his grip on her hand tightened, his 150 pounds of weight dragging on her arm suddenly enough to wrench her shoulder painfully. While she and Rondeau were standing on relatively solid boards, Beta-B had stepped into a ragged hole in the floor easily six feet across, and now dangled over an abyss, wind whipping at his hair and clothes. Far below, sparks of dark blue light began to circle like luminous sharks. “Pull!” Marla shouted, and Rondeau grabbed her around the waist and lunged backwards, tugging her back and pulling Beta-B halfway up out of the hole. Marla got her free hand on Beta-B’s collar and hauled him onto the boards, where they both lay gasping. Beta-B trembled. “Fuck,” he said. “It’s cold down there.”

“Guys,” Rondeau said. “Um. The floor. Is melting.”

Marla leapt up. The boards were actually disintegrating – turning to dust and vapor – rather than melting, but this was no time to criticize Rondeau’s choice of words. They all ran, boards creaking and splintering alarmingly beneath them, toward the twisting corridors ahead of them. This is like one of those action movies, Marla thought, where the treasure hunter runs along a stone catwalk through a temple while the walkway collapses right behind him. Except in this case, there wasn’t a neck-breaking fall into a chasm at risk, but a potentially bottomless plummet into the gap between worlds. Marla ran, ignoring the branching tunnels and the doors – some of which were hanging crooked on their oh-so-ordinary brass hinges – and focusing on the way ahead. Great holes gaped in the walls, with that hellish biting wind ripping through, and the ceiling sagged down in places so low she had to duck her head to avoid brushing it, but it was the floor that worried her, as cracks began running in from the sides and holes opened that she had to leap across, Beta-B and Rondeau on her heels.

But then she turned a corner, raced past another of those doors (this one mercifully solid and shut), and there it was: the hole they’d torn in reality, smaller and partially healed-over but still big enough for a person to slip through, kaleidoscope lightning flickering within. “Through there!” she shouted, and was about to throw her bag through the portal and then dive after it when Rondeau bellowed.

She stopped, spun on her heel, looked back, and saw Rondeau standing on her side of a rapidly-widening crack in the floor… with Beta-B standing on the other side. He was tottering, barely keeping his balance, about to pitch into the depths. He recovered, falling back and sitting down on his ass, a look of total incomprehension on his face. The ground was literally disappearing around him, darkness and wind shredding the tunnel behind him to cut off his retreat, bits of the wall and ceiling turning to puffs of dust swallowed by the abyss.

“B, Bradley, man, jump!” Rondeau shouted.

But Marla knew that was hopeless. The crack that separated them from Beta-B was already several feet wide and getting wider, and Beta-B didn’t have any room behind him to back up and get a running start. He was on a melting ice floe in a tropical sea, and he knew it. The stunned look on his face vanished, replaced by a look of resignation. He shrugged, held up the palms of his hands as if to say “What can you do?” and glanced at the closed door on his left.

The very existence of those doors terrified Marla. Who knew what kind of places the possible witch needed easy access to in order to do her inscrutable work? The doors might lead to places where reality had altogether different rules, places where the air was boiling lead, places so dense they’d make black holes look like aerogel. But this wasn’t a case of choosing door number one or door number two. This was door number only. A Hobson’s choice: this, or nothing.

In her world, Bradley Bowman had lost his life and mind and soul and vanished into nothing.

This Bradley, at least, had a door.

He shouted something to Rondeau – Marla, standing farther back, only heard the sound, and the wind tore the sense away. Rondeau shouted something back, ran to Marla, and began pulling her toward the portal. She waited, though, even as the crack in the floor approached her, until she saw Bradley put his hand on the brass knob and open the door. She was hoping for some sign of hope – a radiant white light, maybe, the usual Hollywood visual shorthand for heavenly transcendence.

But the door just opened on more darkness, and Bradley gave her a dramatic, funny grimace – What, I have to go in here? – before stepping through.

“Come on!” Rondeau shouted. He climbed through the portal.

Marla followed, and entered her home universe with tears in her eyes.

#

Rondeau fell out of a tree, and rolled over in time to keep Marla from landing on top of him. He sat up unsteadily, looking around, trying to get his bearings. The sky was dark, the moon bright, and the only structure nearby was a white-painted gazebo. He groaned. “Marla. I think we lost some hours or something, should it be this dark?”

“We’re in Fludd Park. Back home. It’s later on the east coast.” She sat up, grasping her head. “Fuck. I have to. Turn it off.”

“Turn what off?”

“The city sense. Alarm bells in my head. Felport is screaming. Bad things happened here, Rondeau. They’re still happening.”

“Bad things happened back there, too. Bradley…”

Marla rose, bracing herself against the tree. “What did he say to you?”

“He said, ‘Go, then. There are other worlds than these.'” He shook his head. “Stephen King reference. Bonus points.”

“I don’t get it,” Marla said.

“There’s this King book –”

“No, it’s okay, I don’t need to understand. You guys had your private jokes. I liked that, liked seeing you be friends, you should…” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Rondeau had seen her cry before, but she usually had an arrow sticking out of her thigh or something when it happened. “Fuck. I don’t believe in destiny, Rondeau, you know that, but I’ll be damned if the universe doesn’t have it in for Bradley. Shit. The universe. It’s me. I’m poison to that guy.”

“We don’t know what happened. What he found beyond that door. Maybe it’s the big rock candy mountain over there. Heaven with male strippers. An open-air sex and ice cream pavilion. It’s possible, right?”

Marla shrugged. “I keep you around for your optimism, Rondeau. At least we can imagine some kind of good outcome for him. What harm can it do? Next time I decide to rip apart space-time because I really miss B, just slap me upside the head, would you?”

“Will do. So… what now? I’m guessing we don’t have any time to grieve or process the shit that just happened, right? I mean, what did happen? Why the total collapse?”

“I think when the possible witch went wherever the fuck she went, her home base started to fall apart. It was a little bastion of order in a big chaotic void, and once she wasn’t there to maintain it anymore…” Marla shrugged. “We’re lucky we didn’t get stuck on that side.”

“Lucky. We’re stuck over here with the Mason now, right? And she’s done who knows what?”

“Yeah. We’re gonna have to deal with that.”

Rondeau leaned against the tree and closed his eyes. “Then let’s do what we need to do pretty fast, before the denial and numbness fade, okay?”

Marla rummaged in her bag and found her cell phone. Her sometime employee Langford, a technomancer, had fixed it for her so it could get reception even on the moon, but it hadn’t worked across dimensions. When she turned it on, though, it informed her she’d missed some calls.

About 875 calls in all. And she had voicemail messages aplenty. She pushed buttons at random, cursing, and finally handed it to Rondeau. “Can you work this thing and listen to the last message? Maybe we can hope for an executive summary or something.”

Rondeau nodded, punched the buttons, and held the phone to his ear. Hamil’s voice, hurried and worried and dripping with fear, entered his ear. He listened for a long time, then let the phone drop to the ground, and slid down the tree.

“Tell me,” Marla said.

“Granger dead.” He swallowed. “Viscarro turned to ashes. Doctor Husch – ah, fuck, Marla, Leda, torn to pieces.”

“What about Ernesto?” Marla said.

Rondeau shook his head minutely. “No. He’s… they got him. Dead.”

“Half the council,” Marla murmured. “She killed half my fucking council?”

“She could have killed Hamil, too. She left him alive to give you a message. The Mason says she’s at my club. In your office. She wants to meet with you.”

“I’ll just bet she does,” Marla said.

“If you don’t show up in the next 24 hours – less than that, now – she says she’ll destroy the whole city.”

“She won’t have to wait, we’re going now, we’re going to –”

“Marla.” Rondeau shook his head. “You can’t charge in. Not this time.”

“Bullshit. There’s not a problem I can’t solve with –”

“Didn’t you learn anything?” He didn’t shout, though he felt like shouting. He just didn’t have the energy. “You were sure you could just brute-force your way into bringing Bradley back to life, right? How well did that turn out? You managed to beat the Jaguar, but you did it because you had a good plan, you didn’t go all pissed off and try to beat him to death with a shovel. Like you said. The Mason killed half the council. I don’t think a simple ass-kicking is going to get the job done. I want her dead as bad as you do, but if we’re going to do this, can we do it with a plan? ”

Marla opened her mouth, expression furious, but then her face relaxed and she just sat down. “Thanks,” she said after a moment. “I guess I needed that.” She thought for a moment. “Okay. What did you have in mind?”

“Getting help. You know some serious badasses, Marla. Hell, call Genevieve, let’s get some reweaving going, turn the Mason into a field of cabbages or something.”

Marla shook her head. “Genevieve doesn’t have that kind of fine control. Her powers get away from her. That’s why she took herself out of the game, to her little bubble reality, because the world’s not safe when she uses her powers. Besides, she’s still human, and Crapsey can take control of human bodies at will – what if he jumped into her and took over her body before she had a chance to unleash her mojo? Think of the damage they could do with her abilities. No.”

Rondeau cleared his throat. “Well, what about, you know… The guy. With the rings. Mr., let’s say, Mr. D.”

Marla frowned. “What do you know about him?”

He shrugged. “Your office is right next to my kitchen, boss. I hear you talking sometimes, and even if I can’t make out the words through the privacy wards, I recognize the tone of the guy’s voice – you don’t forget what the lord of the underworld and the incarnation of Death sounds like. The guy did take over the whole city and try to kill me, you know. I know you two are, ah… friends. Or whatever. That you’ve kept in touch. I mean, he’s death. Surely he can go to bat for us.”

“I can’t ask him for help,” Marla said, scowling. “We don’t have that kind of relationship. Besides, he’s not overly concerned with my survival. If I get killed, he figures that means the two of us just get to spend more time together. Which doesn’t sound bad in theory, and after another century or so of life, I might even get to like the idea, but not now.”

“If you asked for help, he wouldn’t kill the Mason?”

Marla shook her head. “He couldn’t. You remember when he saw my cloak? How it scared him, because it doesn’t come from this universe – from this multiverse? It’s an alien, outside thing, beyond his ability to affect. He can’t kill it. He’s the death of every living thing from this world… but the Mason’s from another world. Outside his jurisdiction.”

“Maybe he could kill the body the Mason’s using, though, I mean –”

“And maybe not,” Marla snapped. “Maybe that body is basically just a zombie now anyway. Look, it’s not a terrible idea, and I’ll take it under advisement. If all else fails, I’ll call him. Assuming I can get the little bell I use to call him, which is presently in a drawer in my office where the Mason is sitting reading my mail. But I’m not used to running for help to some man, even a man who’s not really a man, and I’m not starting now, especially since I don’t think he’d be much use in this situation. I can deal with this on my own. This afternoon I beat a god. I can handle a bitch in a magic cloak, especially when I own exactly the same magic cloak.” She looked at Rondeau as if daring him to challenge her, but he didn’t rise to it. She slumped. “Really, the Mason doesn’t worry me that much. It’s Crapsey. If I show up, what’s to stop him from knocking my soul out and wearing my body like a suit?”

“There are protection spells, right?”

Marla nodded. “Sure. Total psychic armor spells. They protect you from possession, the thing on the doorstep trick, mind reading, and everything else – it turns your mind into a lead-lined box. Which is fine, but it’s serious complex long-term ritual shit. The kind of spell Susan Wellstone likes to do, but I don’t have the months it would take me to prepare or the week to perform the ritual. And even a sniper putting a bullet in Crapsey’s head won’t help, because he’ll just take some other host. No, the Mason I can handle, but your evil twin… He’s the real problem.”

“I might be able to fix that,” Rondeau said. “If you call the Mason and Crapsey and set up a meeting. But not right away. Like, in the morning. We have to run some errands first, get prepared.”

Marla cocked her head. “Yeah? You’ve got a plan?”

Rondeau laughed. “Not even close to a plan. But I’ve got a tactic. I can take care of Crapsey. The rest is up to you.”

“Well all right.” Marla picked up the phone. She poked at the buttons for a moment, then thrust the cell at Rondeau again. “Dial my office number, will you? I can never remember how to get to the stupid contacts list.”

“She can kill gods, but she can’t operate a cell phone,” Rondeau said.

“I can kill annoying employees, too.”

“Then who’d work this thing for you?” He handed her the phone. “There. It’s ringing.”

Marla listened for a moment. Then she said, “Hi, you. It’s me.”

“Crapsey, take him!” the Mason screamed. She tore at the branches of a tall oak tree, which looped and surrounded her like the bars of an ornate birdcage.

“I can’t!” Crapsey shouted. “He’s not human anymore!” He fell back, avoiding Granger’s inch-long claws.

Granger was the guardian of that bit of green space at the heart of Felport called Fludd Park, and he’d transformed himself into an oversized polar bear, some serious Pleistocene megafauna shit. He had to be thirteen or fourteen feet tall when he was reared back on his hind legs, and probably weighed more than a ton. Crapsey lost his footing in his retreat and went slipping and sliding down the hill toward a duck pond, landing in ankle-deep water. Great. Now he was damp and likely to die soon.

Granger was supposed to be the easy kill. Gentle, easygoing, dumber than a sack full of spoons – he was a joke. The Mason had killed him in their world at the same emergency meeting of the council where she’d offed most of the other major sorcerers in Felport. But this time they’d attacked Granger on his home turf, and apparently, that made all the difference. The whole park had turned against them from the moment they entered – tree branches reaching out for them, spontaneous sinkholes opening under their feet, birds trying to peck out their eyes, vines trying to strangle them. The park was as dark as the Mason’s heart, too, no street lights penetrating this far in, just the faint shine of the moon and stars to combat the looming shadows teeming with bugs and beasts and badness.

Crapsey splashed out of the shallows of the pond, but then the water itself rose up into some kind of pond-scum golem and batted him aside. Rocks and boulders began rolling toward him of their own volition, and he had to dodge and jump and sprint to avoid getting crushed. Meanwhile bear-Granger was advancing, roaring. Crapsey looked up at the Mason in hope of salvation, but she was still stuck in a fucking tree, though sawdust was showering down as she tried to escape.

I wish Nicolette were here, he thought. All this crazy shit happening would be like fuel for her, and she’d twist the chaos to her own purposes. Oh well. He dove into a somersault, wrenching his shoulder pretty badly in the process, and tried to hide behind a wrought-iron bench. The bear approached him steadily, down on all fours now, drool falling from his jaws like a waterfall.

What were you supposed to do with this kind of bear? Play dead? Climb a tree? Playing dead wouldn’t help since this bear had a human mind, and climbing a tree was no good since the trees were trying to kill him too. Death – or at least the death of this, his favorite body – was looking pretty likely.

Well, when you run out of intelligent options, do something crazy.

He vaulted over the bench and charged the bear. A normal bear probably would have just eaten him, but the frontal assault clearly surprised Granger, probably since Crapsey had been more of a panic-and-run opponent previously. Crapsey feinted a punch at one side of the bear’s head – the head was about as big as Crapsey’s whole godsdamn torso – and when the bear snapped his jaws at that side, Crapsey darted around to the other, trusting in speed and agility over sheer mass. He got alongside the bear, jumped onto his back, and did his best to wrap his arms around the bear’s neck. Choking Granger out wasn’t going to work – he might as well have been choking a utility pole for all the bear seemed to notice – so he sighed and muttered one of the magic words the Mason had prepared for him.

They were all stupid-sounding words. Titmouse. Whiffenpoof. Polliwog. Kumquat. The particular word he used this time was “Grommet.”

Like all his magic words, this one made the runes in his jaw glow blue – and then did something horrible. Crapsey screamed as his jaw dislocated and expanded, unhinging like a snake’s, but, he assumed, far more painfully. Needle-sharp fangs bloomed from his wooden jaw in profusion, and Crapsey lowered his face to the bear’s neck and bit down.

Crapsey tore away a mouthful of fur, skin, blood, muscle, and fat, and though he tried to turn his head and spit, his possessed jaw held on and forced him to swallow. The Mason’s spells were just as bitchy as the woman herself. As Granger moaned and thrashed, Crapsey bit down again, teeth gouging and shredding and tearing, jaw grinding and scraping against bone.

But he wasn’t making any progress. Granger’s healing powers were profound, and the open wound filled with new flesh as quickly as Crapsey could bite, skin and fur regenerating as well. The trees around them sagged, branches drooping and flowers wilting, as the nature magician drew life force from the park around him. Crapsey’s magical jaw was clamped on now, though, grinding and biting with a mind of its own, and there was no letting go. I’m going to literally explode from swallowing too much bear meat, Crapsey thought. It was certainly an unusual way to go.

The Mason dropped from the tree and landed before Granger. “You’re killing the park,” she said, conversationally. “We’ll keep attacking you, and you’ll keep stealing life from the birds and bushes and grasses and squirrels until they’re all dead. Eventually we’ll be fighting in a sandy wasteland. And then we’ll kill you anyway.”

Granger roared, though it was more a howl of dismay than rage, and he sank down to his front paws. The Mason knelt and looked into his ursine face. “So you can fight, and kill the park, or die, and we’ll spare the park. I solemnly promise, no harm will come to your domain if you just give in.”

The bear suddenly rolled over, tens of hundreds of pounds pressing against Crapsey and snapping several ribs and squeezing all the air out of his lungs. The roll tore Crapsey loose – mouth still jammed with bleeding bear meat – and he gasped in agony on his back, unable to scream because he was compulsively swallowing.

The bear transformed into Granger, kneeling and bleeding copiously from a wound in his neck. “Why are you doing this, Marla?” he said. “Don’t I do good for you? Fight for you? Help you when helping’s what you need?”

The Mason didn’t say anything to correct the case of mistaken identity. Super cruel. “You’ve never been any use to me, Granger. Now it’s time for you to go away.”

“But the park, I have no apprentice, no successor…”

“I’ll take care of the park.” She reached out to pat his cheek. “Better than you ever did. I swear. Just stop fighting. Lay down and bleed. Return to the soil. Feed the trees. Be a feast for worms. All right? Or else the park will be nothing but spoil and desert and salted earth forever.”

Tears running down his broad face, Granger nodded, and curled up on the ground. He began to sink into the earth, and within moments a light covering of grasses sprang up to cover his body, until nothing remained of him but a hump in the landscape.

“I love it when you can just talk them into dying,” the Mason said. “I wonder if that approach would work on Marla? ‘Surrender and give me your cloak, and I’ll spare Felport’? I suppose it’s possible.” She walked over to Crapsey and looked down at him, hands on hips. “Are you all right?”

Crapsey swallowed the last bit of bear meat, and then screamed as his jaw returned to its original configuration. The pain in his face made his body spasm, jostling his ribs and causing a sensation not unlike multiple stab wounds to the torso.

“Crybaby,” the Mason said, and then her cloak was white again – mercy, twice in one day! – and she bent to touch him.

Cool, numbing magic flowed over his skin and penetrated deeper into his body, pain receding to a distant hum, even when his ribs slid back into place. With his ribs unbroken, he finally let himself roll over and vomit, puking a considerable pool of bear slurry into the grass.

With the healing wave still surging through him, even puking wasn’t too unpleasant. He sat up and scooted away from his reeking puddle. “That’s the stuff, boss. Why haven’t you ever healed me up before? You usually leave me to suffer and heal naturally, like some sort of lousy ordinary.”

Her cloak was purple again. She stared up at the cold dead moon as if into a mirror. “Pain is instructive. It teaches you not to make so many mistakes. But we have too much work to do tonight – I need you functional.”

“I presume you’re going to turn this park into a smoking hole in the ground?”

“Breaking my oath to Granger would be amusing. The fool believed my promise – as if I could enter into a binding contract with vermin. I imagine I’ll cause some fires as we leave, but I don’t have time for proper desertification. The Chamberlain still lives, and the Bay Witch, and of course Hamil, and if I have to kill the entire council to goad Marla Mason into facing me, I will.”

Crapsey got to his feet and started trying to brush mud off his suit, but it was so caked in with the bear’s blood and pond slime and other unmentionables that he soon gave up. “Maybe you scared her off, ever think of that? If Marla has any sense she just left the key to the city in her mailbox and left town.”

“Unlikely. The Marla Mason of this world resisted the lure of the cloak, which means she has a strong will – a stronger will even than the version of Marla I use as my vessel. Still, her failure to arrive is peculiar. We have been causing both covert and public destruction for some hours now.”

“Maybe we’re moving too fast. Let’s give her some time to come find us.” Crapsey stripped off his ruined suit jacket and dropped it over the pool of vomit, hiding one bit of hideousness with another. “I need a shower, and new clothes, and booze, and some sleep, and some food –”

The Mason smirked. “You didn’t get your fill of bear meat?”

“It was better than the slop you serve back home, but I don’t much like the aftertaste. I think the meat turned into human when Granger transformed back. Long pig isn’t my thing.”

The Mason shook her head. “No. We will press on –”

“Not in these clothes,” Crapsey said firmly. “Call it weak, call it vain, I don’t give a shit, but I can’t go on like this. I’m wearing a slaughterhouse floor here.”

The Mason made a slight sound of annoyance – enough to chill the blood under other circumstances, but Crapsey had hit his limit for the night, and didn’t much care. He was pretty sure he was still more useful than annoying.

“Fine,” she said. “We will pass a clothing store, I’m sure, and you can break in long enough to change. I will cast a spell of satiation and stimulus on you to assuage your hunger and exhaustion. Then we will go north of the river and kill the Chamberlain and banish her beloved coterie of ghosts, and –”

“Boss, somebody’s coming.” Crapsey squinted into the gloom under the trees, where a tall, broad-shouldered figure approached. “Think it’s a mugger? That would be too, too funny.”

The man came closer, stopping a few yards away. His neatly tailored, conservative suit did nothing to hide the fact that he was big, tall, and tremendously fat. Fat, but not flabby – he had what old crime writers called “hard fat”: a layer of bulk over muscle. The moonlight gleamed on his bald, black head, and his dark eyes were calm. “Hello,” he said, voice simultaneously deep and mild. “My name is Hamil. I represent the interests of the sorcerers in this city – at least, the ones you two haven’t killed. Perhaps you’d care to use your words instead of lashing out physically?”

“Want me to drop him?” Crapsey said.

The Mason shook her head. “No point. You could take over the body, but you wouldn’t hurt the man.” She approached Hamil, who backed away to keep his distance. “You look like Hamil, but you’re not. You’re a sort of… meat robot, aren’t you, operated remotely.”

Hamil – or the Hamil-bot – inclined his head. “It seemed unwise to send my real physical body to meet with you, but I assure you, the voice you hear is my own, transmitted from a safe location. Now: what do you want?”

“Do you know who I am?” the Mason said.

He shrugged. “I can speculate. You look like Marla – or the way she looked as a girl – but you aren’t her. He looks like Rondeau, but isn’t. Obviously you’re some sort of… dark doppelgangers. While I’m sure your origin story is fascinating, I’m more interested in practical matters, like how to stop you from killing everyone.”

“I want Marla,” the Mason said.

Hamil sighed. “You could have called and made an appointment. I’m sure she’d be delighted to meet a murdering lunatic who wears her face.”

“This is my way of making an appointment. Where is she? Why did she send you instead of coming herself? Is she afraid to face me?” Crapsey detected a note of real disappointment in the Mason’s last question.

“Not at all. She’s merely out of town.”

Crapsey laughed. “We came all this way to surprise her, and she’s not even home?”

“Where is she?” the Mason said. “When will she return?”

“I can’t divulge that information. But I’d be happy to see you both installed in a comfortable apartment in my building, where you can await her arrival in –”

“You will tell me,” the Mason said. She crossed the space between them in an instant, grabbing Hamil’s lapels and staring up into his face. He outweighed her by a couple of hundred pounds, probably, but there was no doubt in Crapsey’s mind which one of them was scarier. “Or I will end you.”

“Threatening this body is about as effective as threatening the mouthpiece of a telephone,” the Hamil-bot said dryly.

The Mason cocked her head, as if listening to distant music. “This body… is a mindless vat-grown clone, accelerated to full growth, operated via sympathetic magic – of course it is, you only have that one hammer in your toolbox, so every problem is a nail – with a potent connection between you and the clone, because you are genetically identical. So since you and the clone are indistinguishable at this moment magically, that means, yes…” She grunted, put her hands on either side of the Hamil-bot’s head, and said, “I can snap this creature’s neck and break yours, too. Or I could cast Garcia’s Torment, and make every cell in your body violently separate from every other cell, but that’s so messy. Perhaps I’ll chant the Razor Song, and give you eternal pain instead of a simple death. Ha, yes, keep throwing up those barriers, try to keep the flow of information one way, that’s funny, that amuses me.” She pressed her thumbs into the Hamil-bot’s eyes, and the big man fell to his knees, gasping. “You feel that, don’t you? I could blind you now. Tell me. Where is Marla. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Or I’ll kill you and interrogate your corpse.”

“She went to the other world!” Hamil shouted. “But when she comes back, she will destroy you!”

The Mason removed her thumbs from his eyes and patted his head. “The other world. I see. Oh, yes, I see. Tell me: Why did she go? And tell me: How did she get there?”

Hamil gritted his teeth, and the Mason sighed, and spoke a phrase that made Crapsey want to blurt out his every indiscretion and secret – an incantatory truth-telling compulsion. The spell wasn’t even directed at Crapsey, he’d just caught the edges, and it was all he could do not to start babbling; Hamil didn’t have a chance.

Hamil told what he knew: Marla had kidnapped some dude from another world, thus tearing a gaping hole in the fabric of reality, and then when the kidnapped dude wanted to go home, she took him.

Crapsey said, “Bradley Bowman. Why does that sound familiar?”

“He’s Sanford Cole’s second in command,” the Mason said. “One of the rebels in San Francisco.”

“Huh. So the Jaguar hasn’t eaten him yet? And Marla made a deal with some deep scary power and snatched Bowman here because his dead mirror-world counterpart was her boyfriend or something? And she, what, she missed him?” He could barely comprehend the idea. To go to that much trouble, to unleash that kind of magic, just to get back a dead friend… well, maybe if Crapsey’d ever really had a friend he might have understood it better. He was willing to concede the possibility.

“So it seems. I imagine you and I are the magical consequences of her action – that unleashing us on her world was the price the possible witch forced Marla to pay.” The Mason sniffed. “I dislike being a pawn of the deep powers. But the action alerted me to the existence of the multiverse, and showed me that passage between worlds is possible, which is useful information for me. So I am less angry than I could be.” She stroked the still kneeling, now weeping Hamil under his chin. “Listen, Hamil. I’ll allow you to live for a little while. All right? But you must get a message to Marla. Tell her I’ll be waiting for her in her office. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” Hamil said. “I’ll tell her. But I don’t know when she’s coming back –”

“If she doesn’t face me within 24 hours, I will level this city. And I will begin to conquer this world as I conquered the other.” She paused. “Of course, I’ll probably do that last part anyway. But if she faces me, I’ll spare Felport.”

Hamil didn’t respond. She frowned. “Answer when spoken to.”

The Hamil-bot responded by falling over on its side, completely inert.

The Mason sighed. “Ah. He managed to break the sympathetic connection. Well, it is his magical specialty. I shouldn’t be surprised. He’ll deliver my message, though.”

“And if Marla doesn’t show?”

“Then I’ll have the pleasure of destroying this city, which I was unable to do in our world because I wanted to keep my very useful dagger. Either outcome pleases me. Now. We’ll go to Juliana’s club – Rondeau’s club, here, apparently. Your doppelganger must have more self-control than you, Crapsey. If you owned a bar, you’d drink all the inventory.”

Crapsey shrugged. “I live in a hellish nightmare world, and he doesn’t. Of course I need booze more.” He yawned. “I hope Marla waits until, say, after lunchtime tomorrow to show up. I’m looking forward to a shower, and a bed, and maybe some of Rondeau’s clothes will fit me, even if he is by all accounts a scrawny fuck.”

“Enjoy your naptime,” the Mason said. “I’m more interested in exploring the contents of Marla’s files.”

“There aren’t many people who take equal pleasure in ripping off heads and sorting through papers, boss.”

“I am a highly evolved being,” the Mason replied.

Rondeau wasn’t much of a battle leader, so he was more than happy to follow Lao Tsung’s lead. The team crawled through endless tunnels until finally emerging from a storm drain that flowed into San Francisco Bay. Alcatraz Island, their destination, squatted out in the water like a castle surrounded by the world’s biggest moat. A couple of them, including Beta-B, were armed with what looked like paintball guns, but Rondeau assumed the guns were enchanted – maybe they shot acid balls or something instead.

“Okay, Ryan, Josh, let’s get a boat going,” Lao said. The teenaged cousins climbed out of the drain and stood on a scrap of pebbled concrete that jutted out above the water. Crouching, they plunged their hands into the water and began chanting in unison. Water flowed up out of the bay under their hands, forming into a shape like a viking longboat, glinting and translucent. Lao knelt by them, thumped the water-boat with his knuckles – the resulting thunk was reassuringly solid – and nodded, waving everyone onto the boat.

Rondeau got settled, squeezed in next to Beta-B and Jericho, as they skimmed across the bay toward Alcatraz, their little ship wrapped in look-away spells and cloaking magics. The boat was a tight fit – which was weird, since they could’ve magicked-up a yacht or something as far as Rondeau could tell – and Rondeau ended up knees-to-knees with one of the Camp Kimke Irregulars he hadn’t met before, a woman with a snub nose and short red hair and eyes the color of volcanic glass. “Hey,” he said. “I’m Rondeau.”

She nodded curtly. “I know who you are.”

“Guess that means you’re winning, then.”

“That’s Anna,” Beta-B said. “Anna Enzminger. She’s normally very nice, she’s just a little tense because she’s pretty sure she’s going to die.”

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” she said. “Everyone else on this boat is worth something in a fight. I’m just an augur.”

Rondeau blinked. “Like… a drill? You drill things? Like with your mind?”

Beta-B laughed. “That’s an auger with an ‘e.’ She’s an auger with a ‘u.’ Or, another ‘u.’ She interprets signs and omens – taking the auspices from the flight of birds is her specialty, but she’s not half bad at xylomancy either, and she’s a great interpreter of dreams. She was the one who predicted the coming of the Jaguar, and she even warned us the attack we had planned yesterday was too dangerous. Unfortunately we thought it was just normal dangerous, not betrayed-by-Bethany dangerous. Don’t worry, Anna, you’re not storming the castle with us. I wanted you along so you can tell me about this dream I had. I haven’t had a chance to run it by you before now.”

Anna sighed. “Goodie. Another one of those dreams. When did you have it?”

“Right before Marla scooped me up out of my bedroll and dragged me into her world. Here’s what I saw: the woman I now know as Marla Mason, standing in a white cloak, looking into a full-length mirror. But her reflection was wearing a purple cloak instead. Then the mirror opened out into one of those tri-fold mirrors like you used to see in ladies’ dressing rooms, and two of the mirrors were facing each other so you had reflections of reflections, this endless corridor of Marlas stretching for infinity in both directions.”

Rondeau was looking down through the bottom of the boat, which was not so much glass-bottomed as water-bottomed, and he saw an immense shape go gliding by beneath them. “Uh,” he said.

“Half the reflected Marlas were in white cloaks, and half were in purple, alternating colors like squares on a big gay checkerboard,” Beta-B went on. “But then the real original Marla stepped into the mirror, and the Marla in the mirror stepped out, and it was like they melted into and passed through each other, and now the one in the purple cloak was out of the mirror and the one in the white cloak was behind the glass.”

The dark shape passed under them again, closer, close enough for Rondeau to see what appeared to be scales, though what kind of creature had scales but was also as wide as a passenger jet? “Guys, you should, uh –”

“Just a sec Rondeau, this is the freaky part.” Beta-B leaned toward Anna, eyes faraway like the dream was reality and this was the dream. “Next, all the Marlas in white cloaks inside the endless reflections started to flicker, one by one, like fluorescent light bulbs burning out. It was like a wave passing through the curved infinity of reflections, all the white cloaks turning purple. The original Marla, the one now trapped inside the mirror, she was pounding on the glass, like she was trying to break it, but then her cloak turned purple, too – hers was the last white one – and she shattered the glass, and then I woke up. So what’s it mean?”

“Nothing good,” Anna said. “I think it means –”

“Guys!” Rondeau said. “There’s a giant fucking snake in the water!”

Everyone went silent. Lao Tsung swore, softly.

Then the boat capsized and they hit the surprisingly warm water and for a while it was all just blood and screaming and trying to get away.

#

“At least nobody died,” Rondeau said. He, Beta-B, and Lao Tsung sat shivering on the rocks beneath the dock at Alcatraz, dripping water. “And you held onto your toy gun there, B. So that’s a win.”

“It was just a giant fucking reptile,” Lao said. “If a big snake can kill our best battle sorcerers, we don’t deserve to win.” A flap of torn scale floated by on the rippling surface of the bay. The cousins popped up out of the water and dog-paddled over, climbing up onto the rocks. “Everyone make it back okay?” Lao said.

“Anna’s still unconscious,” Ryan – or was it Joshua? – said. “Jericho’s missing a big chunk of his leg. The others are helping them back to camp. We called in to let Cole know. Do you think the five of us are enough to do the job?”

“To invade the Lynx’s fortress?” Lao Tsung said. “Guess we’ll see. We lost a lot of time to that bullshit, though. Threw the whole schedule off. So whatever we’re doing, we’d better do it fast. Bradley, did you get a chance to do any remote viewing?”

Beta-B nodded. “Yeah. Pretty much the same as last time. Lots of ghost cats prowling, and the Lynx is here. Maybe a couple of other people, there were too many shadows for me to make out details, but it’s not like they have hordes of flying monkeys or oompah loompahs or Roman Centurions hanging around. There’s an impenetrable force-field ringing the whole island, and I’m sure they figure that’s enough to keep people out.”

“We penetrated it okay,” Rondeau said. “How’d we manage that?”

Beta-B shrugged. “Sanford Cole. It’s still his city, magically speaking, and he granted us safe passage. Doesn’t mean we can’t get hurt, but it means we can’t be kept out of anyplace. If we get our heads chopped off when we get in there, that’s our problem, though.”

Lao stood. “Let’s go. Boys, you and me are in charge of keeping the big bad guys off our delicate psychic flowers here.” Lao made his way carefully up onto Alcatraz’s dock, and the others followed. The buildings were all covered in twisted green vines and flowers, looking more like an exploded greenhouse than a prison.

Bethany was waiting for them, sitting in the doorway to the cell block. “Hey Lao, kids, Bradley, weird new guy.” She rose from her cross-legged position. Bethany looked pretty much like Rondeau remembered, with horizontal-slit pupils in her eyes like a goat’s, and a fondness for skimpily-applied black leather, and a face that glittered with piercings. Except last time he’d seen her, she was dead. “Saw you had a little trouble with one of the big snakes. Sorry about the whole betrayal thing, really, but I had to side with the winning team. I had fun squatting in a hole in the dirt with all of you, though. Shitting in a bucket is awesome.”

Most of them had stopped when Bethany spoke, but Lao never broke stride, and she took a step toward him, smirking. “Come on, Low Tongue, you think your spells have a chance in hell of hurting me here –”

Lao reached up with both hands, grabbed the rings in Bethany’s nose and lip respectively, and tore the piercings out. Bethany screamed and dropped to her knees, and Lao did something quick and brutal with his hands. Her body fell, head twisted unnaturally, goat-eyes blank. Lao looked back at the others. “If they expect you to attack with magic, don’t. Most sorcerers don’t bother to learn how to be dangerous physically. I did.”

Lao went on into the building, and Rondeau couldn’t help but grin. “Yeah, that’s the guy who taught Marla a good chunk of what she knows, all right. Wish I could’ve met him in my world.”

They followed Lao inside, past cell doors turned into trellises for barbed vines. Half a dozen pale white lynxes sort of… insinuated themselves into the walkway, coming from nowhere in particular, and seeming to pay no attention to the intruders, but Lao stopped anyway. “Are those ghost cats?” he said.

“Yeah,” Beta-B said, “Six of them.” He glanced at Rondeau. “You see them, right? You and me are the only ones who can get a clear look at those things. The Lynx’s little handmaidens, a gift from his boss the Jaguar. The ghost cats are just whitish-gray blurs to people who don’t have our psychic mojo. They’re basically just smarter-than-average jungle cats, so they shouldn’t be that hard to fight, but they’re so damn tough to see, they’ve killed lots of us, just circling around and hamstringing. That’s what this is for.” He unslung the paintball gun from his shoulder and fired off a succession of rounds, thwap thwap thwap, and bright blue splats speckled the cats – Beta-B even managed to get one in the eye, half-blinding it. The ghost cats snarled and leapt, but once they were tagged, the twins and Lao could see them well enough to bring their superior fighting skills to bear. Lao used good-old-fashioned brute force to kill one, while the cousins whipped up some order-and-chaos magic, turning two of the cats against one another, while three more simply froze, rigid, transformed into statues of themselves.

“Let’s keep moving,” Lao said. “There are probably a lot more of these kitties around. And their boss is here somewhere. Which way is the cell, Bradley?”

“There was only one spot on the whole island I couldn’t see via remote viewing,” he said. “They might as well have put up a giant glowing sign reading ‘Big secret thing in here! Don’t look!’ It’s in one of the old solitary cells, that way.”

Lao took point again, leading them down the cellblock, stepping over slithering green snakes and brightly colored – and very likely poisonous – frogs. The place was less a prison and more a deep jungle ruin. Rondeau expected to see Indiana Jones walking by with a bullwhip carrying the head of a jeweled idol in his satchel.

Instead, when they rounded the corner, he saw yet another dead man.

“Lynx,” Lao Tsung said. “We’ve come for your prisoner.”

The man leaning by the one closed solitary confinement cell smirked. He was almost painfully attractive, with copper-colored hair mussed artfully, dark eyelashes, pale eyes, a long lean body, slim hips. He wore simple clothes in white, but they were cloud-white, fog white, as difficult to focus on as the fur of a ghost cat, even with Rondeau’s good vision.

“Come now, Lao Tsung,” the man – dead for many months, at least in Rondeau’s world – said. “We don’t need to fight. We can be friends. I’d be honored to have a man like you by my side.”

Lao frowned. “You want me? Beside you?” His frown became a smile. “Really?”

“We’re fucked.” Rondeau grabbed Beta-B by the arm and dragged him back around the corner. The cousins were staring open-mouthed at the Lynx, as if they’d chanced upon a rock star or a lingerie model at the corner store.

“What are you doing?” Beta-B pulled his arm away.

“That guy is a lovetalker, B, a ganconer, he clouds men’s minds and makes women drop their panties!”

Beta-B blinked. “Shit. That explains a lot. Gods, what a perfect power for a spymaster. He can get anyone to tell him anything, recruit spies even from the most loyal – but wait. How do you know what he is?”

“I met him in my world,” Rondeau said. “His real name is Joshua Kindler. He’s the kind of guy who works for whoever pays best and keeps him entertained, and he nearly got Marla killed this past winter. He did kill a friend of mine. Shit.” He frowned. “But, wait, why didn’t he charm us? I mean, he still looks hot, but he didn’t look, you know… irresistible.”

“That kind of crap doesn’t work on us,” Beta-B said. “We see too clearly. He might be a walking talking illusions-and-pheromones factory, but we’re not susceptible. Unfortunately, the people in our group who can fight worth a damn are vulnerable. I don’t think the Lynx can convince them to kill us – lovetalkers are persuasive, but it’s not mind control, it’s just excessive charm. He can probably convince them to capture us for our own good, though, until he can talk us out of our misguided loyalty to Sanford Cole. I’m sure he’s giving them the heavy spiel now. We don’t have much time. Crap.” He took a breath. “Okay. You’re the only really indispensable guy here. I’ll try to draw them off, distract them into chasing me, and you… do your thing.”

“But –”

“Rondeau. We’re behind schedule already. Marla’s counting on you – if you don’t do your part, she’s going to get her heart torn out and sacrificed on an altar. Right?”

Rondeau closed his eyes. “Right. Crap.”

Beta-B unslung his paintball gun, stepped around the corner, and squeezed off a number of shots, then ran down another corridor. Lao and the cousins pursued him, but the Lynx, of course, didn’t move.

Hell, Rondeau thought. I’m about to have to kill a dude.

“Hey, Joshua,” he said. “Come here a minute?”

The Lynx – Joshua – strolled around the corner, moving as effortlessly as a swan gliding over water. “No one’s called me that in a long time. I’ve had a lot of other names – Lynx is only the most recent – but that is the name I was born with. How did you learn a secret like that, friend?”

“How did you go from seducing old ladies for caviar and champagne money to working for a big cat god on the West Coast?”

Joshua raised one delicate eyebrow. “I see my reputation from the days before the Change precedes me. Hmm. I’ve done a lot of jobs for a lot of people since the sorcerers made their powers public. The Jaguar made me the most recent wonderful offer, so here I am. But we haven’t been properly introduced. What’s your name?”

“Rondeau. But you can call me the Avenger. This is for my friend Ted.”

“Ted? I don’t think I know anyone named Ted.”

“You stabbed him in the guts. Or, well, not you, exactly, but – shit. Never mind.” Rondeau made himself into a bubble, rising up from the sea floor to the surface, bursting free of the water, and –

He was free of his bodily form. A bit of dandelion fluff on the wind. Joshua prodded Rondeau’s fallen body – damn, he’d just let himself drop to the floor again. He’d have to be better about that, maybe start carrying a pillow around with him everywhere.

Joshua said, “How odd. Hello? Was the stress just too much for you? Are you narcoleptic? Or like one of those Tennessee fainting goats?”

Those are stupid last words, Rondeau thought, and settled down onto Joshua. There was a shocking moment of resistance – like being stuck in a sack with a wild animal determined to turn you into shreds of confetti – but then the fight was over, and Rondeau was in a body again, looking out through new human eyes.

He exhaled. Now he and Marla had both killed Joshua Kindler. He waited for the guilt – he was a murderer again, and this time it was first-degree, not second-degree – but no flare of regret came, either because Joshua’s brain chemistry was too conscience-less and sociopathic to support guilt, or because he’d deserved to die badly enough that Rondeau didn’t need to feel any regret.

Lao and the cousins returned, the latter two dragging an unresisting Beta-B between them, one holding each arm. “Here!” Rondeua called, and they came around the corner. Beta-B looked at Rondeau’s body on the floor and moaned. “It’s okay,” Rondeau said. “B, it’s me, Rondeau, I… took Joshua.”

Lao and the cousins stared at him like he was a steak and they were starving. “Damn, I wish I knew how to turn this adoration field off.” There was one way: leave the body, let it drop, let it die. But it could be so useful, to have the powers of a lovetalker, to use this body for a while, to make people do whatever he wanted –

Damn. Those were Joshua Kindler-type ideas, the structure of the brain asserting itself, shaping the flow of Rondeau’s own thoughts. If he didn’t get out of here soon he’d be a sociopath. He thought of: bubbles, and rose up, Joshua’s body falling, brain-dead. Rondeau took his own body back, groaning and rubbing the back of his head, which had thumped the floor pretty hard. “Okay. You guys got your brains back yet?”

The cousins released Beta-B sheepishly, and Lao stepped forward and kicked Joshua in the ribs. “I did not enjoy that. I only regret that I didn’t get to kill the Lynx personally – but thank you, Rondeau. Now. Let’s hurry up and do what we came for.”

Lao searched the Lynx’s body until he found a key, and used it to unlock the solitary confinement cell. The hinges squealed horribly, and when light filled the cell, a figure scrambled into the corner, whimpering.

The body belonged to Mutex, but the intelligence behind the eyes was nothing human. When Mutex summoned the avatar of the Jaguar god, he’d performed a body-switch, putting his own mind into the powerful god’s body, and putting the god’s vast mind in his own constrained human brain. But Mutex couldn’t risk killing the body, and the god inside, because deicide had a way of getting noticed in the upper worlds where such powerful entities lived – killing Tepeyollotl could stir the other slumbering, half-forgotten gods into wrathful action. So he’d imprisoned the god instead, keeping it fed and watered and locked away.

The god in the man’s body covered its head with its hands and cowered. The cousins began lighting candles for the ritual and setting them around the room, and sketching designs on the floor with bits of chalk.

Rondeau took a step toward the terrorized creature in the corner. Marla said the god being stuck in Mutex’s body must be like a person getting shoved inside a cigar box: confining, claustrophobic, unbearable. She figured the god fragment was probably totally insane by now, incapable of anything resembling thought, and –

“Kill me,” the god in Mutex said, voice garbled but intelligible. “Kill me. End this. End me.”

“You heard the man,” Beta-B said. “Or god, I mean.”

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” Rondeau said, and – remembering to sit down and lean against the wall first – left his body again, and settled onto Mutex.

The god didn’t fight him at all. It just let itself be consigned to oblivion – or wherever broken pieces of gods went when they de-incarnated. He didn’t stay in Mutex a moment longer than necessary, returning to his own body, leaving the brain-dead shell resting on the floor. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do the thing on the doorstep trick before Mutex’s body forgets how to breathe.”

The ritual took a while to set up, and required a precise incantation, but Beta-B had practiced, and it went off without a flaw. For sorcerers, leaving your own body and stealing another was hard, but returning a consciousness to its rightful vessel was easier, and if Marla had managed to douse the Jaguar with Pie Bob’s potion as planned, the sympathetic connection would be so strong as to make the distinction between Mutex’s body and the Jaguar’s almost indistinguishable, magically speaking.

The last twisted syllable left Beta-B’s lips, and they all waited, tense, to see if they’d succeeded.

Mutex’s body sat up, eyes wide. “No,” Mutex whispered. “No, I was a god, this can’t be happening, you can’t –”

“Mutex,” Lao Tsung said. “On behalf of the government of the Free State of Northern California, I place you under arrest for crimes against humanity and crimes against the state. Josh, Ryan, tie this asshole up for transport back to Camp Kimke. Though I don’t imagine we’ll be living in that sewer for much longer.” He looked at Rondeau and grinned. “We did it. Later than we liked, but we did it.”

“I just hope we did it before the Jaguar had a chance to kill Marla,” Rondeau said.

#

The skeletal warriors Marla was attacking turned to dust, which wasn’t unusual in the current situation, but many of them turned to dust before she’d even touched them. The cloak’s alien intelligence was in full target-acquisition mode, and when the cannon fodder began collapsing in heaps of armor and obsidian and bone meal it turned her eyes toward the Jaguar himself, standing at the foot of his massive throne.

But then the Jaguar’s cue-ball-sized eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell face-forward like the toppled statue of a deposed dictator. The crash was followed by an earthquake, big enough to make the Palace of Fine Arts groan as its foundations began to shear, but the tremors ceased with unnatural abruptness a second later.

The cloak, faced with nothing living or even animate to kill, was at a loss for a moment, so Marla took the opportunity to assert her will, thinking, Turn, and making the cursed garment’s killing purple switch to healing white.

In the instant before the cloak’s malign mind became quiescent, it whispered, I’ll get you next time.

Marla took a moment to gather herself and shake off the last icy tendrils of the cloak’s influence, vowing I’ll never use it again – something she’d vowed before, and a vow she knew she’d almost certainly break again.

She approached the Jaguar’s body, which was already dwindling and decaying and slumping-in on itself. She knelt, peering at the wreckage, until she spied the seed at its heart, a carving of a jaguar in black glass, about half life-sized. That had been the focus for Mutex’s spell – the foundation for the god’s body, augmented by dark rituals, blood magic, and the power of an ancient artifact called the Cornerstone that was utterly consumed in the process of luring the god to Earth.

Beta-B and Rondeau had succeeded. Mutex’s mind had been snatched out of the Jaguar and replaced in his own body, and since the god’s mind had been destroyed by Rondeau’s possession, there was nothing left to fill the avatar’s form. And now all the god’s works would disappear.

Marla looked around as vines fell away from the ruins, snakes and frogs slowed and died and began to decompose with stunning rapidity, and jungle birds flew desperately southward in a flock so large it blocked out the sun for a moment, many of them falling from the sky like fragments of a midair collision.

“All right then,” Marla said aloud. “That was a pretty good day’s work.”

Crapsey and Nicolette kept up the chase for a while, but then Ernesto did something funny to the air. His body shimmered, as if viewed through water or bubbled glass, and he vanished from sight. The Mason snarled, crouched, leapt, and similarly shimmered, disappearing without so much as a “pop” of displaced air.

“Huh.” Crapsey stopped running and looked around for something to lean against, to get that nonchalant devil-may-care pose just right, but they were surrounded by towering piles of junked cars, which would give him tetanus if he leaned against them, assuming they didn’t just collapse and avalanche him under. He settled for crossing his arms and looking vaguely skyward. “That didn’t look like teleportation,” he said.

Nicolette was just a shadowy shape in the dimness of the evening, except for her glowing spectral arm, which emitted light but didn’t provide much illumination. “Ernesto’s a master of space. They say this junkyard goes on for hundreds of miles, all squeezed into an area just a few city blocks square. The place is like topographical origami, and sometimes apprentices go in deep, and get lost, and never come out again. He did some space-bending hoodoo to try and escape, and your boss just… followed him. Like it was nothing.”

“Most magic is pretty easy for her,” Crapsey said. “Some of the best sorcerers in the world have thrown their nastiest death magics at her, and she just shrugged them off. She says it’s like… density. And mass. The magic where she’s from is a lot denser than the magic here. Like our magic is spiderwebs and her magic is a bus. A bus can drive through a spiderweb without even noticing it. She says most magic doesn’t hurt her any more than getting hit with a foam pool noodle would.”

“Viscarro zapped her good with that staff of his.”

Crapsey nodded. “Sure. But that’s –” He paused, looked around, and sighed. “This is boring. They’re not coming back soon. Want to go to the front gate? Cover the exit or whatever?”

Nicolette shrugged but started walking, and Crapsey kept talking as they went. “Yeah, Viscarro’s staff knocked her down. And there have been other people – well, not people, things – that gave her some trouble. This scorpion creature in the desert. Reweavers. Some guys called Thrones, though she chased those off eventually. Viscarro’s not that badass, really, but he’s got all those artifacts. ‘Artifact’ is just a fancy word for magical stuff so weird or old or dangerous nobody’s sure who made it or where it came from. Some of those things come from other universes – not like versions of this universe, but whole totally other universes, places where the rules are completely different – places where the magic is a lot denser than it is here, maybe. The Mason says with some artifacts, the visible part of them, the part you touch and pick up and zap people with, is just a tiny portion of some much larger thing poking through, with the rest of it hidden in imperceptible dimensions. So maybe Viscarro’s staff was something like that. She says –”

“The Mason says, the Mason says,” Nicolette said. “Since when does she talk so much?”

“Well. I’m kinda condensing stuff she’s said over, like, a decade.” They reached the front gate – the walk back went a lot quicker, probably a folded-space thing – and Crapsey settled down in one of the metal chairs in front of the little trailer-slash-office just inside the fence. Nicolette hooked another chair with her foot and dragged it close, sitting at an angle, not quite facing him. They both had pretty good sightlines into the scrapyard, just in case something should come rushing out. “She doesn’t –”

When the attack came, it came not from the scrapyard but from inside the silver lozenge-shaped trailer. Crapsey gagged as black smoke poured from the windows and roof vents, an oily mist that seemed thick as syrup. Crapsey dove off the chair as the smoke coalesced into something roughly human-shaped, except ten or twelve feet tall. “Pollution golem!” Nicolette shouted.

Well, that was something new. Crapsey squinted his eyes against the reeking smoke and Cursed, triggering a bit of primal chaos to unsettle the world on a small and local scale.

Blue sparks jumped from Crapsey’s mouth toward the smoke creature. The golem caught fire, so now it was a twelve-foot-tall man-shaped creature made of flame, which was, under the circumstances, not much of an improvement. But as it burned, the golem slumped and diminished in size, and Nicolette whipped some charm out of her bag and dropped it to the ground – it looked like a cheap plastic spinning top from a Cracker Jack box, but when it hit the ground and spun it spawned a miniature tornado that whipped the pollution golem apart, flames shredding into nothing, until all that remained was an oily puddle on the ground and a hovering mist of industrial funk in the air.

“So what’s the Mason’s deal, exactly?” Nicolette said, retaking her seat. “She wants to exterminate all life?”

Crapsey turned his chair upright and sat back down. “Nah. Not all life. Things that aren’t sentient don’t bother her much, though she doesn’t have any particular affection for them. It’s mostly people she can’t stand, and dolphins. Practically speaking, killing everybody is really hard, just in terms of plain logistics – the world’s teeming with people, more born every day, billions of them, and most fight like hell to stay alive. She could drop nukes or something, but she says she has plans for the planet, and doesn’t want to break it.”

“She could go pandemic,” Nicolette said. “Disease. Dead bodies everywhere would be a bitch to clean up, but it would get the job done.”

Crapsey nodded. “Yeah. But, see, her goal’s not total extermination. If all the humans died she’d be pissed. She’s into mass murder, but she’s also into eugenics. Breeding people with natural magical talent together, seeing what kind of kids they have. That’s a pretty long-term thing, obviously. She’s also into experimenting on people to see if she can enhance their abilities – she’s got this facility in what used to be Wyoming. I’m telling you, the noises you can hear from outside the walls would make your balls shrivel up, if you had balls. The Mason says humans are weak genetic stock, and it takes a lot of them to maintain a diverse and healthy breeding population, so she needs to leave tons of them alive, or else risk making them extinct accidentally.”

“Wait, so she’s trying to make better sorcerers? Isn’t that… stupid?”

Crapsey shrugged. “She wants them as slaves, I guess. Or maybe as replacement bodies when her current body wears out, assuming it’s not immortal? She’s never really told me why. She’s not majorly into whys. As long as there are some dispensable spare humans I can take over when my body starts to fall apart, I’m happy.”

An explosion boomed deep in the scrapyard, and they both jumped, watching a plume of flame leap up to skyscraper height and then abruptly vanish. “Big boom,” Nicolette said. “Think your boss needs some help?”

Crapsey shook his head. “By the time we got over there they’d be gone. Besides, you saved the day once already, I think you hit your quota for usefulness.”

“I figured if I wanted to stay on the team, I’d better contribute.”

“You’ve been a lot nicer to me lately. Why’s that? Because you want to be part of the team?”

Nicolette shrugged. “Not really. You just got physical. Threatened me.”

“Ha. So you’re afraid of pissing me off now?”

“Jawface, I could turn you into cole slaw. No, I’m not afraid. But I realized you’re more than just Rondeau with a gym membership and a prosthetic face. Rondeau’s weak, basically, and I can’t stand weakness. But you’ve got some initiative. He’s a lapdog, but you’re, at the very least, an attack dog.”

“Woof, woof,” Crapsey said.

They sat in silence for a while, listening for more dramatic explosions, but the only sound was the wind whispering through the junk and the distant hum of freeway traffic. Crapsey leaned his chair back against the trailer and closed his eyes.

If the three apprentices hadn’t screamed half-assed battle cries as they leapt over a wrecked car and charged, Crapsey might not even have seen them coming. But since they yelled, he opened one eye, and there they were: two young guys and a girl in stained coveralls, wielding wrenches and tire irons crackling with electrical magics. Crapsey closed his eyes again, left his body, took over the guy in the back, and bashed the other two in their heads with the wrench until they stopped moving. He let the stolen body drop, returned to his own body, and yawned.

Nicolette, who hadn’t even bothered getting up, said, “I think you’re wrong about why the Mason wants to keep humans alive.”

“Let’s hear your theory, then.”

“I know she’s an incomprehensible alien from another sphere and all that, but I bet she wants what most living things want, deep down in their genes and instincts.”

“What’s that? Food? Shelter? High-quality drugs?”

“Babies,” Nicolette said. “I think she wants to repopulate the Earth in her own image.”

Crapsey snorted. “I don’t see her getting a lot of action, Nikki. Evil Cursed Cloak Single’s Night down at the Community Center never draws much of a crowd.”

“But she’s alien. You don’t know if she even needs a sexual partner. There are things on this planet that reproduce asexually, and she’s not from this planet, so she could be even weirder. Maybe she splits in half like an amoeba. Maybe she buds off little cloaklets when the stars align just right. She could be hermaphroditic and capable of self-fertilization, or like those frogs that change sex depending on whether there’s a shortage of males or females. Hell, maybe her species has a thousand-year gestation period and she’s full of eggs from when she got impregnated back… wherever the hell she’s from.”

Crapsey shivered. That was a horrible thought. The Mason, pregnant. The Mason, a mother.

“Where is she from, anyway?”

“Couldn’t say,” Crapsey said. “Outer. Other. Far away. Someplace much better than this place, at least by her standards, and definitely very different. Some place where the fabric of reality isn’t toxic to her the way ours is. Where she can live without glomming onto a human host. Someplace where she’s not a parasite, but the dominant form of life. That’s the gist I get, anyway. It’s not like she gets drunk and sings old marching songs from the homeland. Sometimes I think she didn’t leave her universe voluntarily, though, and she didn’t get lost, either – I get the sense she was thrown out of wherever she comes from.”

“Great. So our universe is old Australia, a place to exile extra-universal criminals?”

“As good a guess as any. Gods. Pregnant, you think? Babies?”

“It would explain why she wants to make a better breed of sorcerer,” Nicolette said. “She needs a host with a strong will. Breed a lot of hosts with strong wills, and her kids will have their pick of good bodies to ride around on.” The chaos witch shuddered. “Her world sounds fucking awful, Crapsey. Humans are engines of chaos and disorder, they’re wonderful unpredictable things, and she wants to kill most of them and enslave the others. To make a world that’s all rigid and locked down.” Nicolette mimed gagging. “Worse than boring. Poisonous, to me. I like possibilities opening up, not closing down.”

Crapsey nodded. He’d heard similar complaints from the Nicolette of his world, and he told this one what his own version of Nicolette had told him: “Sure, it sucks, but you gotta remember, we’re just the ants. The Mason is the little kid with the magnifying glass. Just be glad she’s not currently burning us alive and make the best of life while you’ve got it.”

“You ever see that comic strip,” Nicolette said, “where the little kid with the magnifying glass gets carried off by ants and dragged down into the anthill?”

“I missed that one,” Crapsey said. “But if I see where you’re going, let me just say, don’t go there.”

“Nah. Of course not.” Nicolette flexed her glowing arm. “Your boss gave me a new limb. Why would I try to turn on her? Besides, she may have sucked some of the marrow out of your world, but now she’s stuck here, and she’s got a job of work to do if she wants to turn this place into an arid wasteland. There’s a lot more chaos ahead of us.”

“Yeah. But she will win.”

“You sure about that?”

Crapsey nodded. “She won in our world, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, but in your world, she didn’t have to fight Marla Mason. Steal her body and eat her brain, sure, but not fight. And our Marla is a dozen years older and a hell of a lot meaner than the one your boss possessed.”

“I thought you hated Marla?”

“She can suck shit out of a dying dog’s butthole for all I care,” Nicolette said. “I’ve tried to kill her before and I bet I will again. But that doesn’t mean she’s not badass. Your boss might be in for a surprise.”

“You can think that if you want, but, like I said, with the magical density thing, the Mason won’t even notice most of Marla’s spells –”

Now it was Nicolette’s turn to snort. “That’s the thing. It’s not that Marla’s so great at magic. I’m better at magic than she is, and I wasn’t even good enough to get on the council until a bunch of other people died and left some seats that needed filling. No, Marla’s good at… refusing to quit. And thinking around corners. And just coming at you and coming at you until you’re exhausted. Sometimes, it’s not so much that she wins, it’s more that you lose. She’s good at, like… bitchiness.”

“And you think the Mason’s not good at bitchiness? Nah. It’ll be no contest. Marla’s dead, if she ever bothers to show up.”

Nicolette was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I guess I’m afraid you might be right.”

“What do you mean you’re –”

The air shimmered, and Ernesto appeared. He was a big man – not pollution golem big, but big enough – dressed in the smoking and shredded remains of a tuxedo smeared with grease. His scalp was a mess, chunks of his thick black hair missing, and he was bleeding from numerous cuts all over his face and hands. He ran flat-out for the gate, seemingly oblivious to Nicolette and Crapsey sitting off to the side.

Crapsey stuck out his foot and tripped Ernesto as the scrapyard sorcerer ran by.

Ernesto fell hard, not even lifting his hands to break his fall, and crashed face-first into the gravel ground. Crapsey rose and sauntered over toward him. “Hey, man,” he said. “Just lay down. It’ll go faster that way.”

Ernesto started to lever himself up, gasping, and Crapsey aimed a kick at his head. Ernesto moved with surprising speed, rolling clear of the kick and grabbing Crapsey’s foot. One clean pull sent Crapsey down, but instead of hitting the dirt he fell into a hole…. a hole that hadn’t been there a moment before. More spatial shenanigans. Crapsey flailed wildly as he fell through the hole, which opened up again in midair over a heap of scrap. He shouted one of the handful of spells he knew – a bit of sympathetic magic that temporarily turned his flesh to Kevlar, pretty much – and bounced hard on bits of jagged metal. He didn’t get sliced into deli meat, which was good, but the wind got knocked out of him and he was going to have bruises later. He scrambled out of the junk heap – he was fifty, sixty yards back from the gate now – in time to see the air waver and wobble again, followed by the Mason’s emergence from some fold in space. Ernesto was on his feet by then, but the Mason struck him like he was a log and she was a wood chipper, shredding and slashing and tearing aside his magical protections like they were gossamer, whatever the fuck gossamer was.

Nicolette approached the tussling pair, holding that silver hatchet she’d stolen from Viscarro’s vault. Even from this distance, half a football field away, he could see the faint moonlike illumination of the blade, and he wondered if the axe was more than a pretty decorative weapon, if it was something special and dangerous and artifact-y. Maybe Nicolette had recognized it and chosen it on purpose. She raised it up over her head, and he wanted to shout at her – “I think it’s okay, the boss has got it under control, Ernesto’s about two minutes away from being hamburger meat” – but it became apparent that she wasn’t planning to attack Ernesto at all.

She was aiming for the back of the Mason’s head.

He almost shouted “Boss!” but, well, if she managed to kill the Mason, that might not be so bad. If she failed – and she would almost certainly fail – he could always say he hadn’t realized what Nicolette was up to, that the fall into the scrapheap had fucked him up too bad to pay attention, let alone intercede. It wasn’t like he was the guy wielding the axe.

But then Nicolette did something funny. She raised her spectral replacement arm, wrapped her glowing fingers around her own throat, and started to choke herself. Nicolette fell to her knees, struggling against her own new limb, and Crapsey figured now was a good time to get over there. He ran as best he could on bruised legs, and arrived as the Mason stood up from the remnants of Ernesto’s body and flicked the blood off her dagger of office.

“Damn, that’s an ugly mess,” Crapsey said.

“He ran. He shouldn’t have run. Chasing him was boring.” The Mason stepped closer to Nicolette, who was now curled fetal on the ground, still choking herself. “I see Nicolette turned on me. I wondered how long it would take. This was faster than I’d anticipated.”

“Huh.” Crapsey was almost bummed. This Nicolette was less irritating than the one in his world. “So, what, the new arm could sense treachery?”

“If she raised a hand against me, she would also raise a hand against herself, yes. As if I would give her an arm she could strike me with. Hmm. Is that the sacred axe of the moon god Aglibol?”

“Dunno. She snagged it out of Viscarro’s vault.”

“Mmm. She has a good eye. That would have stung a bit, no doubt, though it wouldn’t have killed me – in the hands of a god that weapon would be deadly, perhaps, but not in the hands of a mere woman.” Nicolette’s face was turning blue. “We should be going,” the Mason said. “I think we’ll visit the park next and kill Granger, even if murdering him is a bit like drowning kittens.”

“That’s right in your wheelhouse, then.”

The Mason didn’t move, though. “Why did Nicolette betray me?”

Crapsey shrugged. “She said something about you reducing chaos in the world, making things too orderly. And that she didn’t want to be a slave.” He decided against mentioning her speculation about little baby parasitic cloaks. Not that the Mason was really a cloak, that was just the shape she wore. Would her kids look like cloaks? Or would they look like, maybe, handkerchiefs? Bandanas? Ascots?

“A shame. She was useful. Come.” She turned, stepped over Ernesto’s still form, and walked toward the gate.

Crapsey strolled after her, but stopped when Nicolette screamed behind him. He turned in time to see her running, carrying the axe in her remaining hand, into the depths of the scrapyard. “Shit!” he shouted.

The Mason came back and nudged a chunk of bloody flesh on the ground with her foot. “Hmm. Nicolette chopped off part of her own shoulder with the axe, to get the ghost-arm off. Clever.”

“Do we chase her?”

The Mason shook her head. “She’s made her way into the folded space of the scrapyard now, and those rows go on almost forever. There are places where the paths seem to leave this world entirely, though they don’t seem to lead to parallel universes like our own – more like half-finished universes, mistakes, implausible worlds abandoned half-built, or pocket universes made by long-dead sorcerers. With luck she’ll get disoriented and die of blood loss. And if she comes back…” The Mason shrugged. “She’s already proven herself too incompetent to do me harm. I’ll simply murder her then. Come along. Granger’s not going to kill himself.”

Good luck, Nicolette, you crazy chick, Crapsey thought, and then went with the Mason to murder the most harmless and gentle sorcerer in all of Felport.

“Charming city you’ve got here.” Marla stepped over what appeared to be the half-eaten corpse of a frog roughly the size of a car tire.

“It was nicer, once.” Cole’s voice in her ear was as clear as if the man were standing at her shoulder, instead of hiding out safe and sound deep below ground who knew how many miles away. Marla trudged across the San Francisco National Cemetery heading northeast. The graves were all open pits in the earth – the Jaguar had raised the dead, animated them with the souls of deceased Aztec warriors in need of fresh bodies, and set them to doing his dirty work. The sky was blue and the air oppressively humid, which did not match her past experience with San Francisco weather. The Jaguar had brought some of the jungle with him when he arrived. That explained why all the monuments and headstones in the cemetery were wound with vines, their leaves so green the color looked artificial.

Marla had ordered everybody to sleep through the night, because jaguars were largely nocturnal, which meant daylight was their friend. Everybody managed to get some sack time, apart from guard duty shifts, of course – even if Cole said the camp was impregnable, why take chances this close to a big assault? She let Lao Tsung organize the rotation, because the Camp Kimke Irregulars were already irked at taking so much direction from her. This morning Yasuko had taken Marla to a little electric golf cart and driven down miles of tunnel, then led her on foot along less level terrain, including a couple of places where she had to crawl on her belly through old pipes. They’d eventually emerged near the Presidio, the old Spanish fort that had been converted into an American military base until it got decommissioned in the 1990s. Now it was the ugliest part of a national park instead of a fortress. Yasuko told Marla the Palace of Fine Arts was about a mile away as the crow flies, gave her some vague directions, and then scurried back into the tunnels. Once she was gone, Marla put her purple and white cloak on her shoulders, fastening it at the throat with her stag-beetle pin and pulling the hood up over her head. She’d kept the cloak folded up and out of sight on her journey because the artifact clearly freaked Yasuko out, but now that the Jaguar’s spies might see her, it was important to look the part.

Marla wasn’t entirely alone. She had a little enchanted grape seed tucked into her right ear, enabling her to hear and be heard by Cole. When she’d asked why they used a grape seed, Beta-B had started singing “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” making Marla groan. The connection was only temporary – she’d have to ditch the device before she went in to see the Jaguar, because who knew how perceptive he was? – but if there were any disasters in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, she’d hear about them, at least.

Marla left the cemetery and followed Lincoln Boulevard east for a while. There were a few overturned cars wrapped completely in vines, and the asphalt was cracked and buckled. Bright green lizards scurried past, and obscenely colorful birds flitted by. She saw a group of skeletal figures off in the distance, running in circles in a parking lot kicking what might have been a ball but which her gut told her was a severed head. They didn’t notice her. Just as well. You didn’t want to start an audience with a god by kicking the shit out of his palace guards, if you could avoid it.

She left Lincoln, clambered across the ruins of Highway 101, and walked north past a few buildings that had collapsed in on themselves. A snake thicker than a fire hose slithered by in front of her. She wondered where her old ally – and now sworn enemy – Ch’ang Hao was in this universe. He would’ve liked the snakes, at least. She cut across a couple of parking lots – no games of head-ball here – and then, there it was: Mason Street. Marla smiled. She could have stayed on Highway 101 (that would have been faster) but walking down a street that shared her name seemed right. You took good omens where you could find them.

Though since it was also the name of this world’s greatest despot, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea.

Mason Street didn’t go all the way to the Palace of Fine Arts, so she had to veer south after a while. The dome of the Palace appeared before her, and as she drew closer she rolled her eyes at the over-the-top Roman and Greek architecture, the pillars and friezes and carved figures of women all way bigger than life-sized. They were improved by the excessive vegetative growth, in her opinion. “This place looks like crap, Cole. The lagoon would be pretty if it wasn’t all slimed with algae and filled with water snakes. The dome’s pretty impressive, I’ll grant you that, but it’s cracked and covered in vines now.”

“The Jaguar has brought ruin upon the city,” Cole said. “I only hope we have the opportunity to repair the damage.”

“I’ll do my best. Everything going well there?”

“So far. Lao Tsung reported in. They’re on their way to the island.”

“Good. I’d better make with the radio silence, Cole. From here on, we’ll just have to hope our timing works out.” She took the grape seed from her ear and carefully tucked it under a bush. Given the excessive fecundity of this place, it’d probably be a full-grown vine in a couple of days if she didn’t come back for it.

If she failed.

Marla had expected the Jaguar to be inside the exhibition hall, which housed a science museum in less monster-god-oppressed versions of San Francisco, but no, he’d set up his throne room right there under the dome in the central rotunda, surrounded by pillars, but otherwise pretty much in the open air.

There were lots of skeleton types milling around the edges of the dome, armed with obsidian swords and generally looking like rejects from a Ray Harryhausen movie. Marla approached them without hesitation, and they finally noticed her, lurching in her direction and moaning in a decidedly aggressive manner. So much for a peaceful arrival. She drew her dagger of office, and when one of the skeletons lifted his sword, she slashed out, cut the blade in two, and kicked the stunned skeleton’s bony knee, making the corpse collapse.

“Jaguar!” she shouted. “This is the Mason! Call off your goons, unless you want me to chop them all into bone meal!” She kicked and spun, slashing with her dagger to drive back the other skeletons. The vast shape in the gathered shadows beneath the dome shifted. After a moment the remaining skeletal guards drew back, lining up on either side of her to form a corridor that stretched under the dome.

Marla whispered an incantation to improve her vision, and the vague darkness and motion under the dome leapt into well-lit relief.

Good gods, she thought. He actually built a throne of skulls?

The Jaguar was easily three times Marla’s height, maybe even taller – it was hard to tell when he was seated on his ridiculous chair, which was itself bigger than a car. His form was human-ish, just oversized, though his flesh was spotted like a leopard’s and his fingers ended in the claws of a big cat. He was dressed in feathers and gold, and when he showed his teeth, his canines were longer than Marla’s longest knife. “Come forward, Mason,” he said, and the earth literally rumbled when he spoke. Marla wasn’t seriously knowledgeable when it came to Aztec deities, but Cole had given her the crash course: this was Tepeyollotl, “heart of the mountains,” a god of earthquakes, echoes, and jaguars. This particular form was just one aspect of a larger god, of course – that was often the case with such overcrowded pantheons – and one of his other aspects was Tlaltecuhtli, the toad god who’d been brought to life rather more briefly in Marla’s world.

Marla walked to the foot of the throne, which was indeed made entirely of human skulls and bones, some with flesh still clinging to them. The dead flesh should have been the worst stink there, but another smell was stronger: the ammonia of cat piss. Various actual jaguars lay snoozing under the dome, but they didn’t worry Marla. The big guy did. He could probably smush her without much trouble if he wanted, and if he began to suspect she wasn’t really the Mason, he probably would. Marla wasn’t sure how the Mason would act, but based on her encounters with the bleak intelligence that dwelled inside the cloak, she could make some guesses: cold, arrogant, and utterly without mercy or fear.

“Your cloak is white this time.” The Jaguar’s voice was less vast and earth-shaking now. Made sense he could modulate the effect – otherwise every time he asked one of his skeletools to fetch him a beer he’d cause freeways to collapse and buildings to fall down.

“I’m not planning to commit any horrendous acts of violence just now,” she said, not bothering to crane her neck to look at his face, because that would make her look weak. She addressed his knees instead, though she’d gotten a good look at his ugly mug earlier: he had a snout and whiskers, which should have been inhuman and scary, but just made her think of the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz instead. That wasn’t a bad association, actually – like the great and powerful Oz, the Jaguar wasn’t exactly as great and powerful as he seemed. “The white is… call it a flag of truce.”

“Ah.” The Jaguar shifted on his throne, leaning forward to look down at her. “Does that mean you’ve come to accept my proposal?”

“Come down here to my level so I don’t have to talk to your loincloth, kitty cat,” she said.

The Jaguar chuckled and stepped off the throne, losing height and breadth as he did so, until he was more-or-less human scale, though he was still a solid eight feet tall. Well, who could blame him; Marla wouldn’t want to give up the psychological advantage of greater height, either, in his place. He frowned at her. “You look different. Older.”

Marla shrugged. “I sold a few years of my life in a dark ritual to destroy one of my enemies. Since I’m immortal anyway, giving up a fraction of my infinite years wasn’t a tough decision. I’m not as pretty now, but I don’t generally get by on my looks.”

“Mmm. Implausible.” He leaned forward and sniffed her, then nodded again. “But your blood smells the same. You are the Mason. My sentries did not note your arrival in my city.”

“Just goes to show I can get to you anytime I want undetected, doesn’t it?” Marla sat cross-legged on the stone floor, and, after a moment, the Jaguar followed suit.

“You make threats? Against me?”

“Not so much a threat as force of habit. Don’t mind me.”

“Your company disgusts me,” the Jaguar said. “You are an aberration, an outsider, and your very existence poisons the universe. But I acknowledge your power. I am glad you have come to seek an accommodation with me. War would not profit either of us.”

“Who said I was here to seek accommodation?”

He frowned. “When you left after your diplomatic mission, you said you would consider my proposal to divide up the Earth – the Americas for me, Eurasia for you, Africa for me, Australia and the icy north and south and most islands for you. I assume you came to agree, and to make arrangements to remove your influence from this continent.”

“Oh. That.” Marla yawned. “No, I’m not here about that. Here’s my counteroffer: head south, down to Mexico City – that was the seat of your old empire back in the day, right? – and build a very tall, very strong wall. If it’s tall enough and strong enough that none of the people I send to kill you can get inside, then you can live in there… at least until I do manage to knock the walls over. Do we have a deal?”

“You dare speak to me this way?” His voice picked up a subsonic rumble again, the earth quivering. “I am the heart of the mountains, god of beasts and ringing voices and the upheaval of the Earth itself, I am –”

“Cut the crap, Mutex,” she said, and he fell silent.

“I… this Mutex, you refer to the priest who helped open a doorway for me –”

“I refer to you, Mutie, riding around inside the body of a god like a kid trying on his daddy’s rain boots. I know all about it. I know how you raised the Jaguar god, and how you did the thing on the doorstep trick – that’s what we call body-switching around here – to put your mind inside the god’s avatar, and to put the god’s mind inside your stupid, frail human body. You talked a good game about wanting to restore the glory of a fading civilization and to maintain the balance of the universe and make sure the orbits of the sun and stars were well-lubricated with sacrificial heart’s blood, but I know the truth. You just wanted power. That’s okay. I like power too. But, see, I know your secret.” At least, she hoped so. Mutex had switched bodies with the god in her world, and she was betting he’d done the same thing over here. If he hadn’t, and if this really was Tepeyollotl… well, she’d never expected to live forever.

“You know nothing.” The god’s face was hard to read, what with the snout and all, but if Marla had to guess, she’d have guessed “pissed off” and “afraid.” She tried not to smile.

“Right. Because if you were actually Tepeyollotl, you’d totally be squatting under a relic from the 1894 World’s Fair, running the day-to-day business of your empire, instead of, you know, dwelling wherever the gods dwell. Real gods don’t run things directly, Mutex – that’s what priests are for. Gods just sit back and drink the sacrificial blood and occasionally smite somebody for the hell of it. But you’re stuck in this body, this particular instantiation of the god, this one avatar, and sure, you can do some fancy shit: you can make the ground shake and you can control kitty cats and all that, and you’re probably pretty much immortal. But you’re sure as hell no god. If you are, show me one of your other aspects – let froggy come a’courtin’ and show me Tlaltecuhtli. Or how about Mictlantecuhtli, the god of the dead, that’s one of your other faces too, right?”

“You cannot speak to me this way. I am a god.”

“Ooh, or I know, show me the really scary one, the main man, Tezcatlipoca, the one they call the Smoking Mirror – you’re just an aspect of that guy, right? He’s one of the big deities, the Zeus or Odin or Shiva or Ra of Mesoamerica. Except you’re not him. You’re a little piece broken off of him, and you’re just hoping he never notices and comes to reclaim his big kitty cat aspect, aren’t you? You’re probably safe, since the Aztec gods are all sleeping wherever pretty-much-forgotten gods sleep. Except, you know… I can wake the Smoking Mirror. I can get his attention and point him in your direction. I have that power.”

Marla had no idea how you went about summoning an Aztec deity, especially one of the big ones – it had taken Mutex a hell of a lot of blood and preparation to summon the avatar of one lesser incarnation – but the Mason could probably manage it, or at least plausibly make the threat. “Would you like that?” she said. “Would you like me to call your big sky daddy – or underworld daddy or whatever, I don’t know where the gods live in your mythology, I skimmed that chapter – and let you explain to him how you locked a fragment of his consciousness up in a fragile human body?”

The Jaguar stared at her with unblinking, big cat eyes – vertical pupils would have fit right in with his whiskered face, but of course, big cats had round pupils – and then looked off to the side. “I need more than Mexico City,” he said. “Give me all of Central and South America. And we need a treaty. I will respect your borders and boundaries if you respect mine.”

Marla grinned. She had a pretty nasty reputation herself, but the Mason’s rep was ferocious enough to move mountains – or at least the heart of the mountains. Now that she knew she was right, that he really was Mutex in a god’s body, she could move on to the real plan. She could have used this line of intimidation to get the Jaguar out of San Francisco and give the city back to Cole, but that would just be shifting the problem to the people in Central America, who probably had enough problems in this wizard-filled world already. He was just too damn powerful and way too fond of eating human flesh and cutting out hearts. Better to get rid of him entirely, which was why she’d sent Beta-B and Rondeau and the others to Alcatraz to help set Mutex/the Jaguar up for a seriously long fall.

She had to assume her friends had actually done what she sent them to do, which was a big assumption, but she couldn’t be everywhere at once, so she’d have to trust they’d stuck to the plan and pulled it off.

“You’re in no position to dictate terms, catface, but sure, I’ll let you have your little piece of the third world. Behave and I won’t come take it away from you. Okay. We have a deal.” She stood up, lightly shaking her right arm as she did so, making the little vial hidden up her sleeve slide down into her waiting hand. Pie Bob assured her the potion was potent enough to forge a sympathetic magic connection between lightning and a lightning bug, between the moon and a piece of green cheese, between a goldfish bowl and the ocean. “Just one other thing,” she said, flipped the cap off the vial, and dashed its contents into the Jaguar’s face.

If everything on Beta-B and Rondeau’s side had gone according to plan, that should be the last necessary act – the avatar of Tepeyollotl should be effectively neutralized in a moment.

Instead the Jaguar merely wiped the glistening fluid, thicker than olive oil, off his face. “What was that supposed to do?” he said. “Did you think I could be poisoned?”

Shit. Worst case, this meant Rondeau and Beta-B had failed utterly and were now dead. Best case, they were just suffering a little delay, in which case, she should try to buy them some more time. If they were dead, she was probably dead, too, but at least she could go down fighting.

“So that’s a no-go on the poison, then,” she said. “Let’s see how you do with plain old horrific trauma.”

The Jaguar began to grow in size, and the big cats under the dome roused themselves and growled, and the warriors in their tatters of quilted armor lifted their black glass blades.

She was outgunned, if not outclassed, so she didn’t have any choice.

With a mental command, Marla reversed her cloak. The cool white vanished, replaced by the purple of old bruises and poisonous berries. The cloak’s malign intelligence – which, in another place in this very world, had overwhelmed its wearer and become the monster called the Mason – woke up and whispered in her mind. Usually the cloak didn’t speak to her – at least, not with words. It just tried to impose its will, to co-opt Marla and use her rage for its own purposes. To seize control of her body forever, something Marla had always been able to fight off, using the cloak instead of letting herself be used. But this time, the cloak did speak, a voice as cold and clear as desert starlight.

It’s been too long, the voice whispered. I’ve missed you. Think of everything we can do together. Just let go. Stop fighting and let go. I’ll handle everything.

This couldn’t be good. The cloak’s whispers had become intelligible. Did that mean it was getting stronger, that she’d used it too often, that the evil magic had built up in her system to toxic levels? She’d tried many times to give up wearing the cloak forever, because she was afraid its effect was cumulative, magical poison building up in her system like mercury or lead. But the cloak’s magic was too profound, too useful, and she’d never been able to completely give it up. Deep down she’d always believed she was strong enough to fight its influence forever… but maybe that was stupid. In this world, at least, she hadn’t been strong enough, and the cloak had won, and the world had suffered as a consequence.

Well? the cloak said.

Marla, deep inside her own mind, thought, We’ll talk about it later. For now, maybe we should kill these things before they kill us?

The cloak wreathed her in purple light, draping her in shadows that sparked and writhed and lashed.

Killing is something we both enjoy, the cloak replied, and they went about their work together.

Crapsey’s body flew through the air, driven by a wall of green light, and smashed into a much more conventional wall, made of brick. At least, he was pretty sure it was a brick wall. The other possibility was that a truck had crashed into him, and he didn’t remember seeing any trucks rumbling through the catacombs. His body lay crumpled like a pile of dirty laundry at the base of the wall, and the green light faded, though a tinge of the color overlaid his vision, making everything in the dim dank chamber look faintly algae-beslimed.

Viscarro advanced on him, stepping over the Mason and scuttling past one-armed Nicolette without paying them any attention. His robes parted as he walked, and Crapsey noticed he had a false leg, a fancy thing made of brass and carved dark woods, doubtless magically animated. “You must be admiring my prosthesis.” Viscarro’s voice was like coal falling down a metal chute. “It’s an adequate bit of engineering, though nothing like the original. Nicolette would need one of these to replace her missing arm, except she’s going to bleed out and die, making the limb unnecessary. Teleportation is so gauche. Shouldn’t you all know better?”

“Listen!” Crapsey shouted. “I’m on your side! Go over there and take the cloak off that woman before she wakes up! We can end this!”

At least, that’s what he tried to shout, but his jaw stayed firmly closed, and his tongue didn’t so much as wiggle in his mouth. Crapsey tried to get up, but his body didn’t respond. Uh oh. Had the blow snapped his spine somewhere, or had Viscarro’s staff merely paralyzed him? Either way, this body was no good at the moment. There had to be an apprentice lurking around here somewhere he could possess, and with a voice and mobility he could approach Viscarro and make an audible plea for alliance. Or, failing that, go down fighting.

He tried to leave his body, but the zap of green light had shaken up his brain, and it was tough to focus on his visualizations – the image of steam escaping from the mouth of a teakettle usually worked best, but it wasn’t working now, and he couldn’t remember any of his other options, they all tore and blew away. Maybe it was more than the crash-landing. Maybe the nasty green light had done something to his mind.

Viscarro was standing over him, face like old leather stretched on a bone frame, repulsive little teeth bared in a smile of triumph. “I see you lost your jaw again, Rondeau. The new one looks very interesting. What are those runes? They look like Elder Script, but that can’t be, the last known examples were lost, undocumented, when Rasmussen perished in the megalithic temple collapse…” He knelt down, reaching out with his crooked-stick fingers, and Crapsey knew without a whisper of a doubt that he was about to get his wonderful useful jaw ripped right off his face.

Nicolette stood up behind Viscarro, blood still oozing from her shoulder, swaying unsteadily. She had something in her remaining hand, one of her little baubles — Crapsey couldn’t see exactly what. She tossed it underhand toward the back of Viscarro’s head, and then collapsed to the floor.

Crapsey tried to turn his head away, expecting an explosion, but of course his neck wouldn’t cooperate. His eyelids worked, so he just squeezed his eyes shut and hoped for minimal shrapnel. No boom followed, though – all he heard was the thump of Viscarro’s staff hitting the floor and a muffled scream. He opened his eyes, and Viscarro was on the floor, clawing at his face, which had thick tendrils of vegetation – grape vines, maybe? – growing all over it, woody stems twining around his head like a mummy’s cerements, leaves sprouting. Viscarro didn’t need to breathe, and he soon stopped panicking and began groping for his staff, but the vines wound down around his neck and his chest, and bound up his arms against his body. Within half a minute Viscarro was entirely covered in the growths, curled into a fetal lump, and his screams were barely audible under the wooden shell.

A flare of light blazed beyond Viscarro, and Crapsey squinted against it. Nicolette held what looked like an ordinary sparkler, but the head was far brighter than usual, and she gritted her teeth as she pressed the flame against the stump of her shoulder, cauterizing the wound. The white light seemed to burn away the greenish tinge in Crapsey’s vision, and he experimentally twisted around. His body responded, albeit stiffly, and he grabbed Viscarro’s staff – no longer illuminated, it was just a gnarled piece of wood – and used it to lever himself to his feet. He considered giving Viscarro’s vine-twined body a good kick, but it would probably just hurt his foot. The guy was armored.

“You saved my life,” Crapsey said.

Nicolette’s sparkler went dark. Still on the ground, she looked up at him, a lunatic brightness in her eyes. “Damn. I should’ve waited a few more minutes then. Could’ve been rid of you.”

“Don’t make me hit you with this stick when I’m feeling so grateful.”

“Do whatever you like, jawface.” Nicolette winced and looked at the place her left arm should have been. “Damn. Why do I have a sudden urge to go frame Dr. Richard Kimball for a crime he didn’t commit?”

Crapsey frowned. Nicolette often made no sense, so he didn’t bother asking what she was talking about. “You lost your arm in my world, too. Had it amputated by choice, and replaced it with this horrible tentacle thing.”

“Nice. I was just thinking about how this little mishap opens up some intriguing prosthetic possibilities, though I was going in more of a sex-toy type direction. Tentacles are cool, too, though. Help a witch up?”

Crapsey, who was feeling marginally steadier on his feet now, held out his hand and pulled Nicolette upright. They both hobbled toward the still unmoving Mason.

“Think she’s dead?” Nicolette said.

“No. My paralysis went away when Viscarro dropped his magic stick, so I bet the Mason’s did, too. My guess? She’s laying there, listening, and waiting to see what we’ll do – whether we’ll try to take the cloak off, or kill her, or whatever.”

The Mason rolled over and gazed up at them from the floor. “You know me so well, Crapsey. If your body hadn’t been so young and undeveloped when I was looking for a host, I might have taken you over. You’re nowhere near as weak or stupid as people suppose, and while your will is not like that of humans, it has a certain… resiliency, a kind of hybrid strength. It’s just as well — I wouldn’t have been able to use your ability to switch bodies, so it would have been a waste of a good tool — but still.”

“That’s simultaneously creepy and flattering, boss. But what if you took me over and I jumped bodies to get away from you? Wouldn’t you be stuck hanging off an empty body, and pretty much totally fucked?”

The Mason rose. “You could not leap voluntarily in those days. And once I was on your shoulders, and in your mind, I could have made sure you never learned how. Many sorcerers have the ability transfer their consciousness to other bodies, too, you know – I just made sure Marla never did.”

Crapsey sniffed. “And here I thought I was special.”

“Oh, you are. Body-swapping requires preparation and ritual for sorcerers, but it comes so naturally to you. And your ability to… displace… other souls and consign them to oblivion is unique in my experience. Sorcerers have no such power. Their most common approach is merely to switch consciousness, trading bodies, and the act is frowned upon by most, considered a crime and violation. As if vermin can even commit crimes against one another.”

“I know that body-switching trick,” Nicolette said. “It’s a bitch to do right, takes forever to work up the ritual. Unless you’re talking about twins or something, where you can set up a sympathetic resonance, then it’s pretty easy. I knew this pair of twins in the Four Tree Gang who switched bodies all the time, mostly just to sleep with each others’ girlfriends. We call it ‘the thing on the doorstep trick.'”

“H.P. Lovecraft reference,” Crapsey said. “Nice. Bonus points.”

“You can read?” Nicolette said.

“Sure. Well. To be honest, it was like an adaptation in a comic book, but I got the general idea.”

Nicolette shook her head. “Anyway. Not that I don’t enjoy talking shop with my colleagues and all, but can we, like, become people of action again? I ate a painkiller charm, but this stump’s going to start bothering me bad pretty soon, and I lost who knows how much blood. I could use some healing magic. There’s a bruja who owes me a favor, maybe we could go see her –”

The Mason sighed. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

And then something happened that Crapsey had never seen before: The Mason’s cloak flashed and changed to white, the purple visible only when her movements revealed the garment’s lining. The Mason suddenly looked a lot less like a menacing witch and a lot more like a tree-loving druid or something. She smiled. “There was a time when Marla struggled mightily whenever my offensive capabilities were reduced this way, but she’s quiet now.” The Mason reached out to touch Nicolette’s wound, ignoring the chaos witch’s gasp, and white light spiraled up the Mason’s fingers and across Nicolette’s charred flesh.

Crapsey watched, mouth hanging open, as the light swirled and dripped and ran, the cauterized stump becoming pink flesh. White light streamed into the shape of bones, growing down from the shoulder, and more light wrapped the bones to form muscle, and Crapsey said, “Holy shit, are you growing her a new arm?”

“Just something temporary,” the Mason murmured, and indeed, the light didn’t turn into flesh, but stayed light – only light hardened, light in the shape of a bicep, an elbow, a forearm, a wrist, a hand.

The Mason stepped away, and Nicolette lifted her new faintly-glowing arm, clenching and unclenching the fingers. “Fucking cool,” she said. “Feels like the whole arm’s dipped in ice water or something, but still, I can feel. How long will it last?”

The Mason shrugged. “Until I stop paying attention to it. So enjoy it while you can.”

Nicolette swung the arm around, made a fist, and otherwise experimented with her new limb. “Can I do anything cool with this? Suck out life force, or turn people to steam, or anything?”

“It’s an artificial limb made of thickened light,” the Mason said. “If that’s not sufficiently magical for you, perhaps you should recalibrate your expectations.”

“Yeah, all right.” Nicolette pointed her glowing arm at Viscarro. “So what happens to the green man there?”

The Mason circled Viscarro’s wooden sarcophagus. “What did you do to him?”

”Enchanted grape seed. A hundred year’s growth compacted into something the size of a pea. Pretty sweet, huh?”

“Ingenious,” the Mason said. “I will burn him.” The white cloak flickered and became purple again, and the Mason snapped her fingers. Flames abruptly engulfed the wood, leaves curling and blackening, and Viscarro began screaming again, though not for long. The furious and self-contained fire soon turned the vines and flesh and bone underneath to a heap of ash and fragments, then guttered out, leaving behind an oddly aromatic smoke.

“Viscarro’s dead,” Nicolette said. “Or dead-er. Until someone picks up his phylactery, I guess.”

“So, explain that to me,” Crapsey said. “Since we’re on the subject of body-stealing. Viscarro’s got his soul in some geegaw or another –”

“It’s a gem.”

“Right. And if somebody picks up the gem, he takes over their body, right?”

“Not exactly,” the Mason said. “He enters their body, yes, and can attempt to take control. And being very old, and wily, and powerful, he will probably succeed, pushing the original mind into a corner. Much like I’ve done with Marla. Occasionally the two minds can instead reach an accommodation, a kind of shared custody of the body.”

“Like they gotta negotiate over when to jerk off and when to take a nap?” Crapsey said. “That’s stupid. My way is simplest. Scorched earth all the way.”

“Mmm. Let’s go destroy the gem that holds Viscarro’s soul and make the question moot.”

“You know where he keeps the gem?” Nicolette said. “Really?”

“In a locked box in his personal vault in the most secure part of the Bank of the Catacombs,” the Mason said. “I pried it open and destroyed it in my world, and I shall do so here as well. Come.”

#

Viscarro’s defenses were legendary, his vaults supposedly unbreachable, but the Mason didn’t appear to have much trouble, slicing through spells and steel alike with clawed fingers rippling with purple magic. They passed through a succession of increasingly well-protected rooms, shelves lined with objects miraculous and merely valuable and utterly useless, arranged by a scheme known only to Viscarro. There were probably artifacts in here, but the subterranean sorcerer was smart enough to disguise them by hiding them among lots of other junk. Crapsey’s untrained eye couldn’t tell the mysterious wonders of the universe from yard sale bric-a-brac, so he stuck with pocketing portable things of obvious secular value. He helped himself to a few gold coins and precious gems as he trailed after the Mason, and when Nicolette gave him a funny look, he shrugged. “What? I’m just looting a little. You don’t loot?”

“I guess there are some nice things here.” She picked up an ornate, silver-inlaid hand axe with a crescent-shaped blade that gleamed like a fragment of moonlight. “This is cool.” She tucked it into her sack of baubles.

The Mason paused at a shiny steel door that resisted her magic, hummed for a moment, and drew her best knife.

“Is that the dagger of office?” Nicolette wrinkled her nose, probably at the smell of steel going molten under the Mason’s blade. “You’re chief sorcerer of Felport on your side, too? Kind of a square job.”

“She challenged and killed the old boss, Sauvage,” Crapsey said. “And the council didn’t have much choice but to give her the top spot, since she murdered the ones who hesitated. She eventually murdered the rest, too – except Hamil, he got away, and the Bay Witch, who stayed underwater and never came back – but they got to live a little longer by being obedient. She only wanted the job to get the dagger, of course.”

The Mason stepped away from the door, and a large section of steel fell inward with a crash. “There are certain drawbacks,” she said. “To keep the dagger I have to protect Felport, so I made it my imperial capitol, though it is not as favorably located as I would like. Some assume I have loyalty to the place. They are fools.” She stepped into the vault, and returned a few moments later, frowning. “The gem is gone. He moved it.”

“Huh,” Nicolette said. “You know, the fact that Viscarro is a lich wasn’t exactly public knowledge around here, but earlier this year some shit went down and he got outed. Marla really hates the undead, and I was kinda surprised when she didn’t have Viscarro destroyed when she found out… but maybe she made a deal with him, you know? Like, she took his phylactery so she could lay the ultimate beat-down on him if he got out of hand?”

The Mason frowned. “Is that simple speculation, or do you have some reason to believe Marla took such action?”

“I used to have spies and sources, and I heard Viscarro made a special magical safe for Marla not long after his secret came out. I figured it was something for her to put her cloak in… but maybe it was something to put his phylactery in, instead.”

“Where might she keep such a thing?”

Nicolette shrugged. “Her apartment or her office, I’d guess. She spends more time at her office, over Rondeau’s club.”

“Hmm.” The Mason stared at the wall for a moment. “Viscarro is neutralized for now. We will wait. I will kill another sorcerer, perhaps two, before going to Marla’s office. By then she should be sufficiently provoked to put on her cloak and face me, if she still possesses the artifact.”

“Great,” Crapsey said. “Who’s victim number two?”

“There was one name Nicolette mentioned that I did not know. Ernesto?”

“Right,” Nicolette said. “He’s the newest member of the council, took over Artie Mann’s spot when the old perv got murdered by a serial killer targeting sorcerers.”

“Mmm,” the Mason said. “This killer, he sliced open their bellies and spilled out their entrails?”

“That’s the guy. He made trouble on your side too?”

The Mason shrugged. “He killed one of my lieutenants. I faced him and tore him to pieces. He was possessed of strange powers, but nothing I couldn’t handle. This Ernesto, what is his specialty?”

“He does a little of this, a little of that, but mostly he’s good at folding space, you know? Making things bigger on the inside than the outside, that sort of thing. Lives in a big scrapyard in the really ugly part of town. He’s kind of a bruiser, too, not afraid to get into a fight.”

“Are he and Marla allies or rivals?”

“Oh, they’re tight,” Nicolette said. “They were apprentices together, actually.”

The Mason frowned. “Ernesto was one of Viscarro’s apprentices?”

“What? No, he was one of Artie Mann’s apprentices, just like Marla.”

Crapsey whistled. “This parallel dimension shit is weird, isn’t it? Over on our side, Marla was one of Viscarro’s apprentices — before she found the cloak and, you know, became the Mason. Seized her genocidal destiny. All that.”

“I had not expected such a point of divergence,” the Mason said, still staring at the wall. “It would be interesting to speak with the Marla Mason of this world, and find out where else our histories differ. What made Marla in my world put on the cloak that first time and never remove it again, while in this world Marla was able to resist the temptation of ultimate power?”

“Are you displaying curiosity, boss?” Crapsey said. “First you use healing magic, now you’re wondering about psychological motivations and shit. Are you going soft on me?”

“No,” the Mason said. “Insight into such points of divergence may prove useful when I go forth to conquer the other worlds in the multiverse. Come. If Marla Mason likes this Ernesto, then perhaps his death will hasten her appearance. Nicolette, you will take us to him.”

“Wait, what are you talking about, conquering the multiverse?”

The Mason just walked out of the vault without answering him. “I hate it when she does that,” he said.

Nicolette punched him too hard in the shoulder with her glowing fist, and it felt just like getting punched too hard with a real fist. “You gotta admire her, though. She thinks big.”

“Yeah, but if we go around conquering other parallel dimensions, how the fuck many other versions of you am I going to have to put up with?”

“It’s a number best described as ‘bazillions,'” Nicolette said, and left the vault, cackling.

#

They pulled up in front of Ernesto’s scrapyard as night began to fall. They’d been underground for a long-ass time, and Crapsey yawned. “After we murder this dude, can we go get a hotel room or something?”

“We will continue to sow terror well into the night,” the Mason said. “We will acquire stimulants to keep you awake if necessary.”

“I’ve got some mongoose blood and stuff in my bag here,” Nicolette said. She’d rummaged through the barracks where Viscarro housed his apprentices – who’d all fled – and managed to find clothes that didn’t make her look like an escaped mental patient, and much to Crapsey’s dismay he actually found her kind of sexy, since she was wearing a skimpy blue tank top and jeans that were tight enough to reveal: no underwear. In his world, Nicolette slopped around in paint-stained overalls and she also had that nasty tentacle arm, so his body never betrayed him with attraction. He’d been horny ever since meeting Dr. Husch, though. In addition to a hot meal and a hot shower, he could use a hot girl, or at least some alone time to rub one out solo and clear his mind.

“You’re a slave driver, boss,” Crapsey said. Then, to Nicolette: “Literally. She has slaves. She drives them. It’s messed up.”

“Nah, sounds hot to me.” Nicolette reached back to the rear seat and squeezed Crapsey’s crotch. “Your slip is showing, jawface.” She got out of the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut before he even had time to blush.

“Humans are repulsive,” the Mason said, and left the vehicle as well.

“Gods damn it,” Crapsey said to the empty Humvee. “Am I going to end up fucking Nicolette?” Sleeping with her would be as stupid as screwing a bear trap, but the dick wants what it wants. He sighed. It was a problem for another time. For now, he had to go help kill some dude who’d never wronged him, whom he’d never met before, and whose name he honestly couldn’t even remember at the moment. Again.

But first he’d wait for his erection to subside, because that shit was embarrassing.