Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) (2 page)

“Okay, but who’s going to stop this outsider before time runs out?” Henry said.

“With luck, the version of Marla Mason in that branch will find a way to stop the outsider, and if she does, I’ll let her branch continue to thrive.”

“How is she even going to
know
about this monster?” Henry said.

“She has a good nose for trouble,” Bradley said. “And looking back... yeah, this thing was imprisoned in a cavern a long, long time ago, and it looks like it was some of Marla’s hapless death cultists who let the creature free. She tends to take stuff like this personally, so I bet she’ll be on it.” Then he grinned. “But... I think I can spare a fragment of myself to help point her in the right direction.”

He couldn’t spare much. He
wasn’t
infinite, just vast. But he could send a single instance of himself, one that knew Marla, with enough information to give her a hand.

Damn. A little piece of him was going to be on the road with Marla, hunting a monster from beyond the back of the stars, with the fate of an entire branch of the multiverse at stake. “Is it possible, Henry,” Bradley said, “to be jealous of
yourself
?”

“Only if you’re really fucking cool,” Henry said. “So in our case, yeah.”

Rondeau in Las Vegas

“This weather is absurd.” Pelham shed layers of coats and scarves and methodically hung them on the rack by the suite’s front door. “There are children in the streets of Las Vegas throwing boiling water into the air and watching it transform into showers of ice. The rather bewildered weathermen expect the temperature to descend as low as thirty degrees below zero today.”

The suite was a balmy seventy-two degrees, and Rondeau sat on the couch in a robe, watching anything but the weather on the big-screen TV. “This slop is terrible for business,” he complained. “Half the casinos aren’t even open. The slot machines out at the airport are literally frozen up, I heard – you can’t even pull the levers.” He shook his head. “But what are you going to do? It’s the weather.”

“Business is one thing, but we’re supposed to be tracking this monster that Marla’s cultists set free.”

“What do you want from me? I called up an oracle, and it couldn’t get a fix on the thing. Maybe the monster died of natural causes or something. You want us to, what, go door-to-door out in the cold, asking people if they’ve seen a cultist-devouring monster, and no, we can’t describe it?”

“I admit I am similarly unsure how to proceed.” Pelham finally removed enough layers to get down to his customary suit with waistcoat and jacket. “I can’t believe this weather is natural.” He perched on the edge of an armchair and wrung his hands. “Don’t you get any sense of... magical interference?”

Rondeau winced. “I drink a lot of champagne specifically to dull my psychic senses, okay? I’m not going to summon up an oracle just to complain about the cold. The weather guys say it’s just a thing, anyway, a hyperborean vortex or whatever. Some of that counter-intuitive global warming shit. It’s comfortable in here. I say we wait it out. The weather’s gotta break eventually.”

“Half a dozen tourists have died already,” Pelham said. “The locals aren’t likely to fare any better. No one is prepared for this kind of cold here. You can get frostbite in
minutes
if you aren’t careful. People are already losing fingers and toes, and they’re the lucky ones. If it’s magical weather –”

Rondeau sighed. “Fine. Let’s go ask Nicolette. Chaos witches are good with weather, and she can sense when somebody’s playing kickball with natural order too.”

“Have you been to see Nicolette since Mrs. Mason returned to the underworld last week?”

Rondeau made a face. “No. Why would I? I just stuck her cage in the bedroom, turned the TV on, and left her to it.” Rondeau had pretty much always hated Nicolette, and she hadn’t become any more pleasant since she’d been decapitated and had her head endowed with a magical quasi-life and stuck in a birdcage for use by their absent leader Marla as a magic-detector.

They went to Nicolette’s bedroom door, knocked once, and went inside.

The cage on the bed was empty, the base separated from the top. A folded letter rested beside the cage. Rondeau read the pages with rising dismay before handing them over to Pelham.

“Oh, dear,” Pelham said after an interval. “That fellow Squat that Mrs. Mason hired for muscle has absconded with Nicolette.”

Rondeau groaned. “We let Nicolette escape. We didn’t even
notice
she was gone for, what, almost a week?
Marla’s going to kill us when she gets back to the mortal world. Seriously. Kill us. She can do that. She’s the bride of Death, isn’t that what the cultists called her? We’ve got three weeks to live.”

“The situation is indeed problematic, but we are not jailers, and I’m sure Mrs. Mason will understand –”

“She’ll understand,” Rondeau said. “But understanding won’t stop her from
smiting
us. We’re gonna get smitten. No. That sounds too pleasant. We’re gonna get
smote
. How could things get any worse?”

They both tensed up, because saying something like that was an invitation to the universe reading “Please fuck with us further.” Lightning didn’t strike, no one burst into flames, and a chasm didn’t yawn open at their feet, so they went back into the living room, mildly bickering about the best way to deal with Nicolette’s jailbreak.

They stopped talking when they noticed their visitor. A tall, regal-looking older woman in a long black fur coat stood gazing out the windows at the ice-locked streets of Las Vegas below. She turned to them, smiled in a distant and superior way, and said, “Tell Marla Mason that Regina Queen is here to see her. Wait. No. That’s not quite right. Tell her that Regina Queen is here to
kill
her.”

“Ah,” Rondeau said. “Marla’s... out of town.” Despite the bottle of champagne he’d already had that morning, first mixed with orange juice and then with apple juice when the orange ran out, his psychic senses tingled and twinged in this woman’s presence. She was magic, and big magic, too. Something about her name rang a bell, but he couldn’t quite place it.

“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.
”