Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) Page 3

  Marzi went down the stairs, hand on the toy gun’s plastic grip, and continued over the sidewalk, across the street, to the far side.

  The thing glittering in the gutter was a set of keys, and now that she looked there were three other sets, too. Among other things. Several debit and credit cards and driver’s licenses, but no wallets, except for one made of duct tape, and it was falling to pieces. What looked like the rivets and buttons and zippers from a couple of pairs of jeans. A set of eyeglasses, and a four-ounce stainless steel flask engraved with the initials RF. A couple of rings, a pair of hoop earrings, a silver necklace with a tiny leaf pendant, and a scatter of coins.

  “What’s up?” a voice said, and she whirled, drawing the gun.

  Jonathan, wearing his own robe, held up his hands and raised an eyebrow. “Don’t shoot, marshal, I’ll go peaceful-like.”

  She tucked the gun away, shook her head, and pointed into the gutter.

  Jonathan squatted, peered at the litter without touching it, and whistled. “Well. That’s weird. People drop stuff, but... is that a zipper? How do you drop a zipper?”

  “I had a bad dream,” she said. “Woke up, went to the window, and saw some people walk by. There was this thing... a shadow, but moving, swimming through the air like a sea snake... then the streetlight went out, and.... I think the people disappeared. Or something. I came down, and found this stuff. Now you know what I know.”

  Jonathan grunted. “And your hypothesis is... killer shadow?” He didn’t sound incredulous, and she loved him for that. Then again, he’d seen a few impossible things in his time with her. They’d met in the midst of that nightmarish summer when she’d discovered the true malleability of reality, after all. She’d very nearly lost him to it.

  “The thought crossed my mind. Maybe they did just drop this stuff. Maybe it’s, I don’t know. An art piece. Art students are always doing stupid bullshit.”

  Jonathan snorted. He’d been an art student, and had a PhD in critical theory to show for it, which he said was a great qualification to run a café. Marzi had been an art student once upon a time, too, until she dropped out to focus on making comics instead. “So what we’ll do is, we’ll call the cops,” he said. “We’ll tell them we heard a commotion, and when we came out, we found all this stuff.”

  “Declining to mention our killer shadow hypothesis.”

  Jonathan shrugged. “That would be my advice. There are heaps of ID here. If the people did just drop this stuff, the cops will find them, and cite them for littering or something, and all will be well. If something else happened.... We learned a few years back there are some things cops aren’t capable of dealing with.”

  She groaned. “But I don’t want to deal with it either, Jonathan. This whole normalcy thing – I like it.”

  “Maybe it’s nothing we’ll have to deal with. Maybe it’s just... I don’t know. Sometimes, every once in a while, a shark eats a surfer. Maybe, if something did this... maybe it’s just something like a shark. Just passing through.” He looked around. “Though staying in shark-infested waters doesn’t sound like a great idea. Maybe let’s pick this stuff up and go inside, huh?”

  “If it’s a crime scene we shouldn’t disturb it,” she said.

  “I’m pretty sure killer shadows don’t leave fingerprints, and if we leave it all here unattended, somebody will wander by and take the credit cards... but okay. Let’s at least go up on the porch, okay? We can keep an eye on the stuff from there.”

  She nodded, and they withdrew to the steps, the ones leading up to their huge wraparound porch covered in tables and benches, one of the café’s great attractions when the weather was nice, which it was more often than not here on the coast of central California. Jonathan went upstairs to get his phone, then came back down and called the cops.

  Marzi watched the sky, looking for shadows cast by nothing at all.

  Rondeau and Pelham in (and Under) Vegas

  Hamil had been Marla’s consigliere when she was chief sorcerer of Felport, and though their relationship had soured when he voted with the rest of the council to send her into exile, Rondeau still considered the man a friend. He’d bought Rondeau’s nightclub, admittedly a site with interesting magical properties, for stupid amounts of money, laying the groundwork for Rondeau’s subsequent life of leisure.

  Well, mostly leisure. “I don’t know,” Rondeau said. “You’re a master of sympathetic magic. Can’t you just, like, create a sympathetic magical link between someplace really warm and Las Vegas, and kind of balance things out?”

  “Possibly, possibly.” Hamil’s deep, rich voice was uncharacteristically distracted. “But I’d need to go to Vegas, and things are frantic here right now. Don’t tell Marla I said so, but the city’s gone a bit to hell since she left – just now we’re dealing with a rash of inexplicable cases of spontaneous...” The rest of the sentence was indistinct, as if he’d turned his head away from the phone, and Rondeau heard him shouting orders at someone.

  “Did you say spontaneous combustion?” Rondeau said. “We could use some of that around here.”

  “Hmm?” Hamil said. “No, no – spontaneous decapitation. Four cases so far, none of our people, only the ordinaries. Very mysterious, and I’m tracing the sympathetic linkages and – I’m sorry, I can’t be of any help today, Rondeau. Under other circumstances I might, but it’s impossible now.”

  “But–”

  “May I offer a bit of advice?” Hamil said. “If you were in Felport during the days of Marla Mason’s reign, and a strange witch arrived and began causing problems, would you call up someone thousands of miles away for help?”

  “Of course not,” Rondeau said. “Marla was the chief sorcerer, so she’d take care – Oh.”

  “Quite,” Hamil said. “I would have to consult the latest edition of Dee’s Peerage to find out who is currently chief sorcerer of Las Vegas, but in a city that ripe with human emotional energy and the power of random chance, I’m sure someone is in charge, and likely someone powerful. Find the local magical authorities and tell them you know who’s causing the cold snap, and you may even be rewarded for your information.”

  “Thanks, Ham–” Rondeau began, but the big man had already hung up. He turned to Pelham, who was hanging up the other extension, where he’d been listening in. “Hamil makes a good point. I was thinking of this as Marla’s problem, and by extension our problem, but it’s also the city’s problem, so we should go see the chief sorcerer here.”

  “Do you know this person?” Pelham said.

  Rondeau nodded. “If you’re going to do magical business in Las Vegas, the smart way is to get permission from the guy in charge, and make sure it’s a good deal for him, too – which is to say, you make regular payoffs. So we’ve met. Most people call him Mr. Amparan. Some people call him the Pit Boss. He holds court in a secret casino underground, accessible from various places around town by a series of hidden tunnels. They play games for creepy stakes down there. Weird, dark stuff, I’m talking Korean-horror-movie freaky – roulette with eyes for balls, tables where you can wager your gall bladder or your sense of smell for a chance to win your heart’s truest desire. Mr. Amparan is the real deal. He might be able to do something about Regina.”

  “Then let us make our way to his... pit,” Pelham said.

  “Yeah,” Rondeau said. “It’s almost time to drop off this month’s tribute anyway.”

  “How much do you pay him?”

  Rondeau grinned. Pelham probably had a better sense of the financial situation in the casino Rondeau co-owned than Rondeau did himself, and was clearly curious about this unrecorded monthly expense. “I don’t pay him in money,” Rondeau said. “I pay him in luck.”

  •

  They went out into the cold, dressed in bulky ski gear that still failed to protect them entirely from the viciousness of the dry and frigid air. Pelham informed Rondeau that there were portions of the planet Mars that were warmer than Las Vegas on this particular day. The streets
were not piled deep with snow, because there wasn’t enough moisture in the air to produce such drifts, but there was a thin dusting of the stuff, and many patches of ice. Pipes had burst all over town, and some of that water had bubbled into the streets and over the sidewalks and formed treacherous slicks.

  They made their way to a trapdoor two blocks from Rondeau’s hotel, in the corner of a trash-strewn parking lot. The trapdoor was frozen shut, of course, and they had to go back and get a tire iron to pry it open before descending down an iron ladder – the rungs so cold Rondeau was sure he could feel the chill even through his bulky might-as-well-be-for-an-astronaut gloves.

  They walked along an icy brick-lined tunnel to a shining round vault door, which stood wide open and unguarded. “That’s bad,” Rondeau said. The leather bag full of luck squirmed in his pocket. He harvested the luck from the losers in his casino, every bad turn of the cards or disastrous roll of the dice a tiny piece of luck sliced away from them without their knowledge, collected in special crystals secreted in the ceiling, used to pay the monthly tribute to Mr. Amparan, AKA the Pit Boss, greatest probability-mage and stochastic magician in the western United States.

  Rondeau and Pelham went into the underground casino, which was just as cold as the streets above. The gaming tables (with shackles at the corners, for advanced play) and the wheels of fortune (with their possibilities that ranged from the sadistic to the sublime) and the steel cages where the living collateral were usually housed, all dripped with icicles, and the recessed circular pit in the center of the room where Mr. Amparan usually sat with his cronies and held audiences was filled with frozen water, like an ice-skating rink.

  Most of Mr. Amparan’s upper body was sticking out of the ice, his dark skin tinged blue, his mouth open in surprise, arms lifted up to fend off an attack.

  “Hello, boys.” Regina Queen spun around on a bar stool in the lounge. A frozen statue of a bartender stood on the other side, holding a by now very chilled martini shaker. “Is Marla home yet?”

  “Not as such, ma’am,” Pelham began.

  “Ah. You came here hoping to get help, didn’t you? Some of Mr. Amparan’s men tracked me down and brought me here to meet with him. First he tried to threaten me. Then he tried to pay me off. Then I got bored and killed them all.” She shook her head sadly. “How is it you still don’t take me seriously? I supposed I’d better kill one of you, too, to drive the point home.” She lifted one long-fingered hand, almost lazily.

  Rondeau pulled out the squirming bag of luck and threw it on the ground between Pelham and himself, where it fell open and spilled forth an aromatic smoke of concentrated good fortune. (It smelled a bit like smoky poker rooms, a bit like horse shit, and a bit like the gasoline stink of a NASCAR track.) Regina’s aim was off, thanks to their burst of good luck, and a potted palm two feet to Rondeau’s right turned to ice and shattered. Rondeau and Pelham ran for the exit, gaming tables and chandeliers turning to ice and shattering in their wake, and scuttled up the ladder to the street above.

  Regina didn’t follow, but they didn’t dare return to the suite, just in case. They found a bar, one of the few that was still open, with half the tables supporting humming space heaters, and a handful of dedicated drunks at the bar wrapped in winter coats and, in one case, a stinking old horse blanket. The guy under the blanket was muttering about how this was wrong, all wrong, Las Vegas was Hell, and Hell wasn’t supposed to freeze over.

  Pelham and Rondeau ordered hot toddies and sat in a corner, sipping, close to one of the heaters.

  “We have to kill her now,” Rondeau said. “I mean, I’m as civic-minded as the next guy, let’s do our bit to save the people of Las Vegas, for sure, but – she’ll kill us, is the thing. It’s personal now.” He sighed. “I was hoping to make this someone else’s problem, but we’d better find an oracle and ask it how we can stop Regina.”

  Pelham nodded. “It seems the only sensible path.”

  “No, getting in a car and driving until we’re south of the equator is more sensible, but I like it here, at least when the city’s not frozen over, so let’s try this other thing first.”

  They lingered over their drinks, though. Oracle-hunting was cold work.

  •

  “There’s one here,” Rondeau said at last, his voice muffled by the scarf wrapped around his face, despite the heater in the car running full blast. Pelham doubted the car would have started at all if it hadn’t been enchanted to run with magical efficiency.

  Finding oracles was always a tricky proposition. Rondeau could sense likely locations for them, but only in a hot-and-cold sort of way, so they’d driven around for a while on the deserted streets. Now they were parked in front of Bally’s Las Vegas, one of the most decidedly un-magical places Pelham could imagine, especially on this icy night, with only a few of the windows in its hotel towers lit. Just about everyone who could get out of Vegas had done so by now. “Why here?”

  “Fire,” Rondeau said. “This used to be the MGM Grand. There was a terrible fire there back in 1980, killed 85 people, injured close to a thousand. This oracle... I think it likes fire.”

  “Seems promising, given the nature of our adversary,” Pelham said.

  They got out of the car, stepped into the brutal moonscape, and walked slowly toward the covered moving sidewalk that ferried tourists from the street to the casino entrance... except the sidewalks weren’t moving, and the neon lighting was shattered, and there was no music playing.

  Rondeau paused in the entryway and grunted. “It’s... this is a big one...”

  A sheet of flame erupted from the ground, a curtain four feet wide and eight feet high, and that curtain parted to reveal a...

  “Demon” was the only word Pelham could think of. Roughly human in shape, over seven feet tall, skin like flowing magma, eyes black and shiny, and a maw full of glittering obsidian shards. “Speak,” it said, in a voice of crackling flames.

  Rondeau’s voice was strained. Summoning oracles always took something out of him... even before the time came to pay the individual oracle’s idiosyncratic price. “How much to answer a question?”

  “Mmm. Burn something you love here, so I can smell the smoke.”

  “An object or a person?”

  It chuckled. “Just for a question? An object is fine.”

  Rondeau nodded. “Okay. How do we kill Regina Queen?”

  The demon shrugged. “Easy. Throw her in a volcano.”

  Pelham winced, and Rondeau sighed. “Right. Okay. Helpful. Thanks.” He started to turn away.

  “Wait,” the demon said. “I’ll kill the ice queen for you, if you’re willing to pay a little more.”

  Rondeau and Pelham exchanged glances. “That’s... not usually how this works,” Rondeau said. “Usually you oracle types just tell me stuff, and make me do stuff in return. I mean... can you even do anything by yourselves, without me summoning you up?”

  “Hey, this is Vegas. Land of opportunity. I’m just trying to get ahead.”

  “My understanding regarding the prevailing theory is that you oracles don’t have any independent existence or agency,” Pelham said, trying to ignore the fact that he was talking to a seven-foot-high magma monster. “That you are essentially externalized manifestations of Rondeau’s mind, projections he creates, which allow him to receive psychic insights that are too profound for him to access in a more straightforward way, such as through dreams or meditation. That there are locations of inherent latent power, or places infected with ghost-residue, which serve to boost his psychic abilities and give a particular shape to a given oracle’s appearance and manner, but that you are ultimately just aspects of Rondeau himself.”

  “Yeah,” Rondeau said, voice weak with the strain of calling up the oracle. “What he said. Though some of the things I’ve talked to, I have trouble believing they came out of my own head.”

  “I don’t know about any of that,” the demon said. “That’s philosophy or psychology or maybe even religion, and that
’s all outside my area. I’d sure like to kill somebody though. Say the word, and I’ll help you get rid of your witch.”

  “Uh,” Rondeau said.

  “Perhaps if you agree it will become a sort of tulpa,” Pelham said. “A living thought-form. A projection of the mind that manifests in a physical body.”

  “Whatever,” the demon said. “Do we have a deal, or what?”

  “Maybe,” Rondeau said. “What’s it going to cost me?”

  “More than burning your favorite baby blanket, that’s for sure.”

  “I’m not burning a person. No murder. Not even mercy killing.”

  “Understood,” the demon said. “How about you just... owe me a favor.”

  “That’s not how this works. It’s not all open-ended.”

  “Your call,” the demon said. “I can’t force you to take the deal.”

  “Shit. Okay. A favor. But look, I’m not doing anything that violates my, like, personal moral code.”

  The demon laughed. It was a pretty normal laugh, considering the mouth it emerged from. “That should be fine, given the state of your morals.” It rubbed its hands together. Sparks flew. “Here’s what we do.”

  •

  The Mirage Hotel was just as deserted as Bally’s, and the fake volcano out front wasn’t doing its hourly eruptions. Rondeau had spent enough time in Hawaii, close to real volcanoes, to find the fake rock structure totally unimpressive, more like a pile of cobblestones than a real cinder cone.

  But here they were, dressed in bulky coats, standing on top of the damn thing, waiting for Regina Queen. Rondeau was terrified some automatic switch would click over and make the fake volcano start barfing jets of flame.

  Regina appeared without making a grand entrance, just suddenly standing with her arms crossed, frowning, on the volcano’s edge. Rondeau and Pelham had been forced to find the route the maintenance guys used to get on top of the volcano, but Regina had floated up on a cloud of snow or some shit, probably.