Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) Read online

  “Then summon her,” Regina said. “I’ll wait.” She sat on the couch and crossed her legs. The temperature plunged at least fifteen degrees wherever her roving gaze fell.

  “Oh, right.” Rondeau snapped his fingers. “Marla told me about you. She met you on a mercenary job, years ago. You’re an ice witch.”

  “An ice queen, really – as my name declares. Twice.”

  “I heard you were up north,” Rondeau said. “Arctic Circle territory.”

  “I was, for a time. I find humans objectionable. I came south when I learned my son Leland – you knew him as Viscarro – was killed. By Marla Mason. Your employer.”

  Rondeau winced. “Employer? Lately I’ve been the one giving money to her, but come to think of it, she does still give me orders.”

  “I do not wish to speak to the valet,” she said. “Or the psychic parasite.”

  “Hey, us parasites are people too,” Rondeau said. “Or, at least, we possess people, which is pretty much the same.”

  Pelham cleared his throat. “Ma’am, if I may.” Pelham had lots of training on how to talk to nobility, and he used his best butler’s tone. “To be technical Viscarro was already dead, having transformed himself many years ago into a lich, a ghost haunting his own corpse – and, to be more precise, it was not Mrs. Mason who ended his corporeal existence, but a dark duplicate of Mrs. Mason who hailed from an alternate timeline parallel to our own –”

  Regina held up a hand, and Pelham stopped cold. “I may be a snow queen, but that doesn’t mean I have any patience for fairy tales. I looked upon the charred fragments of my son, and found traces of Marla Mason’s aura and flesh and psychic resonance there. She is to blame, and frankly, I don’t care if it was some alternate dimension version of her, or a clone, or a time-traveler from her own future, who did the deed – I will take my vengeance on the Marla I can reach. It’s a shame. I was mildly fond of the woman – she did me a favor, once. But some crimes can have only one punishment.”

  “I thought you hated Viscarro?” Rondeau said.

  Regina turned her icy regard on Rondeau, making him shiver. “What does that matter? He was my son. No one gets to kill my children without consequences, except me. Call her.”

  “Okay, that business is between you two, but Marla is... seriously unreachable,” Rondeau said. “For at least three more weeks.” Rondeau wasn’t about to explain that Marla was a part-time goddess of death, spending six months of every year in the underworld, doing – literally – gods alone knew what.

  Regina hmmed. “I understand Marla prefers that innocent lives be spared whenever possible. Tell her I will kill one person the first day she makes me wait. I will kill two the next day. I will double that number the next day. And so on, doubling the previous day’s total each subsequent day. It won’t take long to empty the city at that rate, will it? Those deaths will be in addition to any who simply succumb to the weather, which will only get worse the longer I wait. Tell Marla to hurry, won’t you?”

  “We can’t,” Rondeau began, and then stood in horror as the saliva in his mouth froze, jamming his jaws closed. He grunted in surprise and pain as Regina strolled toward him. She reached into the pocket of his robe, took out his phone, and diddled around with the screen before returning it to the pocket. His lock screen didn’t seem to slow her down any, either. “There’s my number. Call when Marla’s here. A little hot water will clear out your mouth. Don’t say ‘can’t’ to me ever again, all right?” She sauntered regally out the door, leaving it standing open behind her.

  “Oh, my,” Pelham said after a moment. “I suppose that’s how things could get worse.”

  •

  They made a good-faith attempt to reach Marla. There was a magical bell she used, in her mortal months on Earth, to summon her husband the god of death, but ringing it didn’t accomplish anything. The old necromantic rites were no good either – Marla and Death had stopped appearing or letting their underworld minions answer when necromancers made sacrifices, because, as Marla said, who wanted to encourage that kind of antisocial behavior, all the vivisection and ritual murder? They even tried the supernatural equivalent of leaving a message, by shouting into a fire full of small animal bones (remnants from the empty kitchens downstairs), and when that failed, they slumped down on the couch in the suite. They didn’t know what Marla did during her month in the underworld, but it was vast business, and she didn’t have much concern for the mortal realm while she was there.

  “Ms. Queen can’t mean it literally,” Pelham said. “Killing two people the second day, fine, and four the third, all right, and eight the fourth, and even on through sixteen and thirty-two – but before long she’ll be into hundreds, even thousands, every day. How is it practical to kill that many? With any precision?”

  “You’re right,” Rondeau said. “She’ll probably top out around thirty a day, sure. Or else she’ll show a willingness to sacrifice precision, and just kind of kill roughly the right number of people.” He put a pillow over his face. “So what do we do?”

  Pelham shrugged. “What would Marla do?”

  “Something clever, and if that didn’t work, something violent. She’d stop Regina, anyway.”

  “Then as Marla’s agents on Earth during her absence, we must do the same,” Pelham said.

  “You’re noble. Why do I live with someone noble? Your plan is mostly flaws. You mix a hell of a hangover cure, Pelly, and I’ve seen you thwack guys pretty good with a walking stick, but you’re not actually a sorcerer. And while I’ve got some psychic powers that came along with this body I stole a while back, they’re definitely more on the diagnostic side than the offensive one. I could find out where Regina Queen is hiding, but I can’t make her head explode when I do.”

  “Ah, but you and I possess one great power that Mrs. Mason does not,” Pelham said. “We are capable of asking for help.”

  Rondeau took the pillow off his face. “I like the sound of that. On account of how it doesn’t involve me fighting Regina Queen directly.”

  •

  “I know, it makes sense, start at the top, call up the big guns first.” Rondeau stared at the syringe in his hand, the rubber tubing wrapped around his upper arm, the bulging vein in his forearm. “And Bradley Bowman’s more than a god, he’s like a meta god, he’s the scary story grown-up gods tell their little godlings to make them eat their celestial vegetables. But this is the only way I know to get Bradley’s attention, defiling this body I stole from him, in this very particular way, and I’m afraid he’s going to be pissed.”

  Pelham sat on the edge of the tub, hands laced over one knee. He’d bought the heroin from a dealer who usually supplied Rondeau with different drugs, and cooked up the stuff with the same skill he used to flip crepes. “You don’t actually have to inject the vile stuff. Just make Bradley think you will –”

  “But I have to mean it. I have to really intend to do it. Bradley oversees the multiverse, he can see possible futures or something, I don’t know exactly how it works, and if he sees that I’m really going to shoot up, that’s when he’ll come, if he comes at all.” Rondeau closed his eyes. He had nothing against getting high, but he did have something against annoying beings of unfathomable power, especially Bradley, since he’d already stolen the guy’s body. But here he was. He moved the needle.

  “Rondeau, put that shit down,” Bradley Bowman – B to most his friends, when he’d been mortal enough to have those – called from the living room.

  Rondeau exhaled in relief, put down the syringe, untied the tube, and walked unsteadily into the living room.

  Bradley wasn’t there in person – if he even had a person anymore. His face loomed on the TV screen, in extreme close-up, his tropical-ocean-blue eyes calm, his former-movie-star features as scruffily handsome as always. “Don’t pull anything like that again, all right? Heroin, hell, man, you know my one true love died of a heroin overdose. I get it, that was the point, to get my attention, but that’s cold, Rondeau. Next
time you want me, go to Oakland, down by 38th Street and Telegraph Avenue, and yell my name into the sewer grate. I’ll lodge a fragment of my attention there. But make sure if you call it’s more important than this.”

  “Sorry,” Rondeau squeaked. Bradley had been a nice enough guy once, but now he was something far beyond human, however normal his face looked.

  Pelham cleared his throat. “Mr. Bowman, sir, we have a terrible problem – Regina Queen has threatened to kill – “

  “Hey, Pelham, yeah, I know. This isn’t the only universe where she pulls this crap, and it doesn’t look good for you, but there are a few paths where you come out the other side intact, basically. You’ll work it out. My job is watching out for existential threats to the fabric of reality, incursions from hostile universes with inimical physics, stuff like that, not... fighting ice witches. I sympathize, but I’ve got an exiled outsider from an especially nasty bubble in the quantum foam increasing his ontological mass on your Earth at an exponential rate, and I’m a lot more concerned about him than I am about Viscarro’s mom going around killing people.” He paused. “Can you believe Viscarro has a mom? Who’s still alive? I figured the dude was hatched from a spider egg or something.”

  “If you can see worlds where we don’t fuck this up,” Rondeau said, “maybe a little guidance – “

  “Rondeau, if you need guidance, you can summon oracles. I know – you use the brain that used to belong to me to do it. Take care of my body, would you? It wouldn’t hurt you to get on a treadmill every once in a while, lay off the all-you-can-eat buffets a little. As for this Regina thing, keep doing what you’re doing. There’s a good sixty percent chance you won’t even die.”

  The television turned itself off.

  “Hmm,” Rondeau said. “Keep doing what we’re doing. So. Next witch on the list?”

  •

  “You’re sure this will work?” Rondeau said.

  “Mrs. Mason told me it would attract Genevieve’s attention.” Pelham was methodically slicing his way through a bag of lemons from Rondeau’s bar.

  “But you make lemonade all the time. And lemon chicken. And lemon drops. Lemon meringue pie. You slice lemons a lot, is what I’m saying, and it’s never tempted a reweaver capable of altering the nature of reality to come out of the pocket dimension where she lives.”

  “The element of intentionality is necessary.” Pelham picked up a lemon and sniffed it, eyes closed. “I have to call her, with my mind.”

  “Not fair. Why did you learn this summoning trick? Did you ever even meet Gen? I was actually there, when she was turning Felport into a hallucination amusement park. I even helped stop the nightmare king who tormented her. At least, I mean, I was around at the time...”

  “Hello, Rondeau,” Genevieve said. One end of the kitchen had turned into a pavilion of white silk, and a woman with violet eyes and caramel-colored hair stood shyly, half-hidden by a curtain. “Did you need something? Is Marla all right? It’s only, I shouldn’t stay too long. Just being in the world like this, it makes thing start to go... soft... around me...”

  Rondeau suddenly regretted suggesting they call Genevieve. She’d developed some control over her powers, so her worst nightmares didn’t just pop into being anymore, but she was still dangerous, and she knew it – that’s why she chose to inhabit a little pinched-off bit of reality, where she could reshape the landscape to suit her whim without damaging a place where regular people actually lived. “Uh,” he said. “The thing is....”

  Then he blinked, or didn’t even blink, but it was like reality blinked, and he was on his back underneath the glass-topped coffee table in the living room, wearing only one shoe, with a terrible headache, and Pelham was sitting up groaning beside the frosty balcony door. “Wha?” Rondeau said. “Did Gen... do something?”

  “I think she left,” Pelham said. “I think... she might have been annoyed? That we called her for this?”

  Rondeau squinted. Had there been yelling? His memories were like those of a dream, fading from his short-term memory as he came awake. Something about how if Genevieve meddled, she might cause a drought that would consume the world, or bring on a new Little Ice Age? About how you didn’t bring a thermonuclear bomb to a knife fight? “Oh. Right.”

  He turned his head. His beautiful big-screen TV was gone. In its place rested a single yellow lemon.

  “Damn,” he said. “I liked that TV.”

  •

  “What?” Rondeau held the conch shell to his ear. “You – okay, I get that, I know, Marla owes you a favor, you don’t owe anyone any favors, I’m saying, maybe I’ll owe you a favor if you come help. I don’t know, you’re an ocean witch, that’s basically the same as weather magic, and anyway, won’t this hyperborean vortex mess up the Gulf Stream or something – Huh. That’s – right. Okay. Uh, no, yeah, I’m still gay, not planning to hit the coast soon anyway – right, sure, thanks.” He hung up, if that was the right terminology to use for putting an enchanted conch shell back down on the table.

  “That didn’t sound good,” Pelham said.

  “Zufi was in a pretty lucid state of mind,” Rondeau said. “Not having one of those days that’s all non sequiturs or talking in rhyme or making dolphin noises, so at least I got a straight answer, even if the answer was ‘no.’” Zufi, the Bay Witch, was one of the more powerful sorcerers they knew from their old days in Felport, and she’d given them a hand in Hawaii not long ago, so they’d had hopes she might intercede this time too.

  “Did she say why she can’t help?” Pelham said.

  Rondeau shrugged. “She’s an ocean witch. Nevada is landlocked.”

  “There are planes,” Pelham said. “Rivers, too, if she insists on swimming. Lake Mead isn’t entirely frozen over yet.”

  “You ever try arguing with Zufi via conch shell? It’s even more pointless than arguing with her in person.” He sighed. “Who’s next? And what will we have to sacrifice or chant or enchant in order to call them?”

  “I suppose we could try Hamil,” Pelham said. “He actually answers his phone.”

  Rondeau nodded. Hamil had been Marla’s consigliere when she was chief sorcerer of Felport, and he was still a big deal there, second-most-powerful figure on the council, and a master of sympathetic magic. “I don’t think he has any particular reason to hate me,” Rondeau said. “And at least he’s extremely unlikely to turn either of us into a lemon.”

  Marzi in Santa Cruz

  Marzipan McCarty, known as Marzi to everyone other than her whimsical parents, gasped herself awake in the tiny apartment over the café she co-owned. She rolled out of bed, her boyfriend Jonathan grumbling beside her at the disturbance. He knew she was a light sleeper, and had long since grown immune to waking up himself just because she had a nightmare. She had them often: mostly about mudslides, earthquakes, wildfires.

  But this dream hadn’t been one of the usual sort. This one seemed meaningful in a way that was familiar, and unwelcome. A few years earlier, her dreams had contained messages from powerful forces dwelling among the hidden machinery of the world, and she’d done what was necessary to stop the evil those dreams had revealed, but damn it, she was done. No more visions, please.

  She went to the little round window in their attic apartment, the one that looked down onto Ash Street. Santa Cruz streets in summer were rarely entirely deserted even this late at night, and a chattering group of twenty-somethings went by laughing and babbling, probably a little drunk. About as normal as normal could be. Dreams didn’t have to mean anything –

  A shadow detached itself from the wall of the hot tub place and spa across the street, and Marzi stared, waiting for it to resolve into the form of a drunk, or a homeless guy, or even a mugger. She’d be grateful for a nice mundane mugger.

  But it just remained a shadow, even when it entered the pool of light cast by a streetlight: a swirling coil of darkness, like a long black chiffon scarf twisting in the wind... or like a sea serpent, undulating through an invisible sea,
moving gracefully toward the four people walking.

  Was she dreaming still? Because she’d dreamt of something like this. Only in the dream it had been a rippling shadow drifting across the sky, growing larger and larger until it hung over the world like a veil, blocking out all the light, plunging the world into a somehow carnivorous darkness.

  She rubbed her eyes. It had to be a trick of the light. Or, okay, it didn’t have to be, she knew better than that, but she was out of the monster-slaying business, so she hoped it was.

  A coil of the floating darkness reached out toward the streetlight, and the light blinked out. In the sudden darkness, Marzi couldn’t tell exactly what happened – there was some motion, perhaps, and maybe a muffled gasp, but that was all. She kept watching, waiting for the group to appear again in the light cast by the streetlight on the next corner, but they didn’t. The darkness wasn’t that complete, but... she couldn’t see them at all.

  She put her nose against the window, trying to get a closer look, but her breath just fogged the glass. Cursing under her breath, Marzi picked up the black silk robe Jonathan had given her for their fourth anniversary and pulled it on over her pajamas. She slipped on her flip-flops and started toward the door, then paused and picked up the revolver resting beside her drawing table. It was a toy, a vintage cap-gun from the ‘50s... except once, in a showdown, it had been more than that: a more potent weapon than any mortal firearm. If there was any magic left in the thing, it wasn’t evident, but holding the pistol always made her feel stronger, more brave, capable of anything. After all, hadn’t she once done the impossible, and slain something very like a god?

  She tucked the gun into the pocket of her robe but kept her hand on the grip, then unlocked the door. Their little apartment – they called it “the pigeonhole” – was technically the finished attic of the café she co-owned, Genius Loci, but she didn’t have to go through the café to get outside; there was an outside entrance with a set of wooden stairs leading down to the street, so she stepped out onto the landing and looked down. The extinguished streetlight was back on now, and its light revealed absolutely nothing. No shadow, no twenty-somethings walking along, no signs of anything... except, was that something glinting in the gutter? Probably just broken glass or the shiny inside of a torn potato chip bag, but...