Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) (25 page)

Marla nodded, not very patiently. Bradley could have probably just ripped the knowledge they needed out of the guy’s brain without forcing them to endure a conversation, but he preferred a more delicate approach. This poor guy had been through enough.

“So I got here,” Drew went on, “and mostly I just worked a lot, you know, sixty-hour weeks, sometimes eighty-hour weeks during crunch time, the start-up standard. Occasionally I’d go out to clubs and bars and I’d see those San Francisco girls, with the piercings and the straight black bangs and the cool tattoos and the motorcycle boots and the heavy eyeliner, and I tried to make time with a few of them, but mostly they seemed to be laughing at me or bored by me, you know? They’d let me buy them drinks all night but then they’d leave with some hipster wearing tiny pants and giant glasses, or else with another girl. The only real date I had was with another programmer, who also went to MIT, and I mean, I could’ve stayed in Boston, right?” He took a breath. “But then last night, I was sitting in this little hole-in-the-wall burrito joint after another bad night at the bars, it was maybe two in the morning, and I met her. Llyn.” He spelled the name, and Marla grunted.

Would the Outsider call himself by a name like that? Bradley wondered. What kind of name was it, anyway? Welsh, or just pretentious?

Drew went on. “She was... she was just this hurricane of a girl, you know? Tiny, maybe five-foot-one, barefoot, wearing a short skirt and a shiny top and about eighteen hundred scarves in all different colors, bangles on her wrists, ankle bracelets, red and green streaks in her hair, ukulele hanging on a strap on her back, purse made out of a plush toy squid. She ordered a big bowl of jalapenos and then just sat down across from me, looking at me with these huge blue eyes, popping peppers into her mouth and grinning. We ended up walking around and talking all night. She told me she was an art-school drop-out who was into doing sculptures with found objects, and that she spent a lot of time busking on her ukulele for the tourists, and that she liked meeting people who were new to the city because they still had a sense of wonder, and did I want to go back to my place, so, ah...” He blushed, and Marla rolled her eyes. Bradley gave Drew’s sense of propriety a little nudge, and he said, all in a rush, “So we could do some molly and she could suck my cock and then make me pancakes.”

“And you said yes,” Marla said. “Hell, who can blame you? A manic pixie dream girl straight out of a stupid indie film offers you a totally San Francisco experience, who wouldn’t say yes? So what happened?”

Drew looked down. “This place is tiny, but one of its good qualities is the bathroom.” He rose and went to a door with a crystal knob and opened it up, beckoning them to look inside. The bathroom was almost as big as the rest of the apartment – clearly it had been the master bath, and his “apartment” had been the master bedroom, before this house was chopped up into tiny units. The floor was tiled in honeycombs of white and blue, and there was a pedestal sink and a toilet in a fetching shade of teal porcelain, but the space was dominated by was a huge claw-foot bathtub with a showerhead suspended above it.

“She came in, and we made out for a while, and then she wanted the tour, which was kind a joke, but whatever. She looked at the bathtub and her eyes got real big and she said we
had
to take a bath together. At that point I still had no idea what she looked like naked, every time I managed to get a scarf off her there were ten more underneath it, so I jumped at the chance. She took my clothes off and put me in the tub and sat on the edge while it filled up, and I mean, she had her hand in the water, and it was pretty nice....” He trailed off. “The tub filled up, and I asked her when she was going to get in with me, and that’s when she pushed me under.”

Bradley nodded. His first thought was: serial killer dresses up like cliché quirky girl to exploit the fantasies of young brogrammers, preying on the tech elite as a symbolic protest against the inevitable horrors of gentrification. But Cole said it was weirder than that, and it got that way fast.

“She was strong. Crazy strong. Couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, but she pushed me under like it was nothing, one hand on my forehead, one on my chest. I looked up at her through the water, and I guess it was just the drugs, but... her face changed. Her body, too. Rippled like water, became translucent, it was like, she
became
water, but her hands were still solid. After a couple of minutes she stopped holding me down and left.” He shrugged.

Bradley frowned. “Wait, so how did you survive? Did someone resuscitate you?”

He shook his head. “I’m good at holding my breath. Have been since I was a kid, when I went swimming a lot with my dad, and I just kept at it. I used to win breath-holding contests, it was my party trick in college. I mean, I’m not like those free divers who can stop breathing for twenty minutes, but two or three minutes? Sure. Once I realized she was trying to drown me I thought I’d better just play dead, and it worked. I think I would have freaked out a lot harder if I hadn’t been on drugs, honestly. Molly saved my life.”

“No sign of her when you got out of the tub?” Marla said.

He shook his head. “No, she was just gone. There were lots of puddles, though, all over the hardwood in the main room, like she’d dripped tons of water around. I called the cops, they took her description and told me not to pick up strange women in burrito shops anymore, and that was it. I don’t get the feeling they’re assigning a task force or anything.”

“What time did she leave?”

“I mean, the whole thing from meeting her to her leaving, it only took maybe two hours.”

Bradley could see Marla doing mental math. The Outsider flees Santa Cruz a bit after midnight, and appears as a cliché dreamgirl in San Francisco two hours later? It was an hour and a half drive at least, but the Outsider was capable of alternative modes of locomotion, so
maybe
it could work, if Drew was its first attempted victim. The other drownings had come later, throughout the remainder of the night and on through the day, the last one a death in a swimming pool just an hour before they’d sat down with Cole. But why death by water? The Outsider
had
been trapped in the caverns below Death Valley for centuries. Maybe it was feeling retroactively dehydrated? Something just didn’t make sense.

Marla nodded. “Well, thanks for your – “

“Wait,” Bradley said. “There’s something you’re not telling us.”

Drew frowned, and Bradley pushed, and Drew moaned. “Okay, fine, she left one of her scarves, it’s under my pillow. I know it’s stupid, it’s sick, but it still
smells
a little like her, she was so hot, I can’t help it – “

“Show us,” Marla said.

Drew went to his futon, lifted up a pillow, and picked up a long piece of ragged seaweed. He rubbed it against his cheek, sighed, and handed it to Marla, who took the slimy thing in her hands. “A... scarf,” she said.

He nodded. “Smells like, I don’t know, vanilla and baby powder and the cherry soda I liked when I was a kid...”

She handed it wordlessly to Bradley, and it smelled like salt and rotting fish to him.

“We’ll have to take this,” Marla said, “but on the plus side, we won’t tell the cops you withheld evidence, okay?”

•

Once they were outside, Marla took the seaweed again. “Well?” she said. “Does this look like a scarf to you?”

“Seaweed. But I looked into Drew’s mind and I could see the psychic tampering. I fixed it while I was in there. But I left his caution about picking up ukulele girls in bars.”

“You’re such a humanitarian, B. Can you use this scrap of slime to track down our mystery woman?”

“Pretty sure she’s not actually a woman,” Bradley said, “but I’ll do the psychic bloodhound thing, sure.”

“It’s not the Outsider, is it?”

Bradley shook his head. “I don’t think so. We don’t know what forms this nixie or kelpie or whatever has taken in other attacks, but in this one, it showed a pretty sophisticated understanding of human psychology and expectations – more than that, it seems to have a sense of
humor
. I mean, the ukulele? Infinite scarves? That’s comedy, right? Like, it’s a
reference
. I don’t think the Outsider saw too many indie films in the impossible desert.”

“Manic nixie dream girl,” Marla said. “That is pretty funny, except for the death by drowning.”

“So, I mean... do we go tell Cole we’re sorry, this isn’t our monster, good luck killing it?”

“Eh. We’re here anyway, and this still might lead us to Reva – he’s got to be looking for the thing that’s killing his people, right? So let’s track down little miss death by water.”

•

They wound up on the western edge of the city, down by the ruins of the Sutro Baths, the once-vast swimming pool complex on the beach that had been reduced by demolition and fire to concrete foundations and a few vestigial fragments of the old buildings. The place was usually popular with tourists who came to hike, take in the shattered grandeur, and look out at the ocean and the nearby Seal Rocks, but today it reeked of rotting fish, and the wind from the sea was salty and stingy, and it was just generally vile and unpleasant. “This place is awful, let’s go somewhere else,” Marla said, but Bradley grabbed her arm.

“Somebody cast a keep-away spell over here,” Bradley said. “A strong one. Of course, I’m immune, but your puny mortal mind is no match for the magic.”

“Who’re you calling mortal,” Marla muttered, shaking his hand off.

“Well, you’re mortal at the moment. Here, let me clear your head.”

“No thanks.” She ducked her head and stomped down the path toward the ruins. Bradley probed into her mind, gently, just tapping into her senses because he was wondering how the spell felt to her, and it was awful: the stink making her eyes water, the wind battering her, the fear that she would slip and fall and be swept away and die (even though lately she couldn’t die) growing ever stronger until –

– she broke through the bubble of the spell and blinked at the calm sea, breathed in the brisk salt air, and didn’t worry about death a bit, as usual. Bradley stepped up beside her. He pressed the rag of seaweed to his face, sniffed, then pointed. “Down there, by the waterline, there’s a cave. I’m pretty sure there’s not
supposed
to be a cave, but somebody made one.”

“Cave invasion time, then.”

They picked their way down the rocks to the beach, and Bradley saw the shadow in the cliff wall where the cave must be. Marla drew her dagger and stepped forward carefully, boots sinking into the soft sand, toward the darkness. “Fiat lux,” she muttered.

Bradley knew she was activating her enhanced night vision, but she didn’t need it: the blackness of the cave mouth was an illusion, and once they stepped inside, the space was lit by battery-powered camping lanterns resting on rocks and hanging from pitons hammered into the cave walls.

An old man wearing a pair of black swim trunks and nothing else was snoring in a brightly-colored hammock swaying in a metal stand, next to an iron cauldron that would have done the witches from
Macbeth
proud.

Marla glanced at Bradley. He shrugged and leaned against the damp wall of the cave. This was more her kind of thing than his.

Marla walked over, put her boot on the hammock, and dumped the old guy out.

He sprang up, sputtering. “What the shit?” His eyes – they were red-rimmed, matching the burst veins in his nose – went wide and he shouted “Llyn!”

The contents of the cauldron bubbled up into a fountain, which turned into the watery semblance of a girl, translucent except for a few scraps of seaweed that sort of looked like hair, and teeth made of shards of shell. The nixie hissed, the water around her mouth boiling in the process, and started to climb out of the cauldron.

Marla lashed out with her dagger, right at the thing’s face. It screamed and fell back when the blade cut across the indentations it had for eyes. Marla slashed down in a looping s-curve through the nixie’s body, and water splashed everywhere, seaweed and shells splattering back down into the cauldron. The old man gaped. “What – what did you do?”

“This knife was made for me by the god of Death,” Marla said. “Forged in an
awfully
hot Hell, a lake of fire conjured by the imagination of a dead guy with a lot of guilt but not much imagination. This blade can cut through anything I want it to. Stone, steel, astral tethers. Water molecules. Don’t worry, your nixie will get her shit back together eventually, but right now a large portion of her anatomy has been reduced to hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and it takes a girl a little time to recover from that.” She held up the knife. “Now, what should I cut
you
into?”

“I won’t fight.” He held up his hands. “Did Sanford Cole send you? I – I don’t recognize his authority, you know. I’m a sea witch, Alexander Thelonious Shaw, my people have been here since the Egg Wars, and – “

“Hush. The hierarchy of the city’s magical community could not interest me less. You were murdering innocent people with your little water goblin there. Why?”

He hugged his arms around his pale pigeon chest. “These new people. They’re destroying the whole culture of the city. Altering the city’s personality. Driving out the artists, the creative people, the ones who make it a world-class place to live. Soon it’s going to be nothing but young technocrats, consuming without creating.”

Marla snorted. “This new wave of people moving in isn’t any different from the
old
waves of people moving in. The hippies pouring in here in the Sixties changed the whole nature of the city, too. The Beats changed things before that, in the Fifties. The people who came for the gold rush in the 1850s – I assume those were
your
people, Mr. Egg War – changed the hell out of the city too. Unless you’re Ohlone, bitching about the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the Eighteenth century, I don’t really want to hear it. Some of these new tech people are assholes, I’m sure, but some of them are perfectly nice people who heard San Francisco was a great place to live, and wanted to move here, so they did. Didn’t you just
have
a tech boom like ten years ago? Gods. You should be used to this. Stop bitching and move to Oakland until the next inevitable bust in the economy drives the programmers out of San Francisco again if you hate it so much. Seriously, there’s gotta be more to it than that. What made you start murdering people? Did you get kicked out of your apartment so some douche-bros could move in?”