Poison Sleep (2 page)

“Ah,” Husch said. “As to the latter, I have…a hypothesis. Come to my rooms. I want to show you some of the security tapes. They’re frightfully boring, for the most part, as you’d expect from footage of a catatonic. But there are some interesting moments.”

“Okay,” Marla said. “Rondeau, bring the box. Some of that stuff might be useful.”

Images flickered on the old television as Husch fast-forwarded through a few hours of surveillance tape. “We don’t keep all the footage, of course. And we have to re-use the same tapes over and over, because we can’t afford new ones every day, but I check them daily for warning signs. And I keep any recordings that seem noteworthy. Like this one.” She stabbed the “Play” button.

Marla leaned in close. On-screen, grainy sunlight streamed into the room from the windows in the southern wall—the wall Genevieve had blasted apart that morning. Genevieve herself lay sleeping in her narrow bed, hands at her sides, and then she was
gone,
like a jump-cut in the tape. Marla grunted, noting the time stamp, which rolled on at one second per second. The tape hadn’t been spliced. Genevieve had just disappeared. “Does she—” Marla began, but then Genevieve reappeared, curled in the fetal position. A scatter of small objects appeared with her, drifting down from a spot midway up in the air, like torn pieces of paper, maybe, or—

“Are those flowers?” Marla said.

“Orange blossoms,” Husch said.

“So, what, she sleep-teleported herself to an orange grove?”

“I don’t think so,” Husch said. “This tape was made last January. Where on Earth do orange trees bloom in January?”

“I’m sure there are places,” Marla said, knowing she was being stubborn.

Husch sniffed. “I kept the flower petals in airtight jars afterward, but they disappeared in a few days.
Real
flower petals wouldn’t do that, would they? I have a dozen tapes like this. Sometimes she reappears on the other side of the room. Sometimes she’s wearing different clothes, though they disappear, too, in time. Once, Marla…” Husch bit her lip for a moment. “Once she came back bloodied, with a knife wound in her thigh. That
didn’t
disappear. It scarred.”

“Huh,” Marla said. “So you said you have a theory. What’s your theory?”

“Genevieve clearly has access to some other place, or dimension, or plane of existence. When Elsie Jarrow woke her, I think Genevieve psychically lashed out, knocking Elsie unconscious and smashing that hole in the wall. And then Genevieve just…went wherever she goes. At some point, she will reappear. Perhaps here. Perhaps elsewhere.” She spread her hands. “I never claimed it was a
helpful
theory.”

Marla nodded. Genevieve could have gone to…lots of places. There were plenty of folds in this world, and lots of other worlds entirely. Some of them didn’t even exist until you entered them. Which didn’t mean they were otherwise uninhabited.

“You have footage from this morning?”

Husch shook her head. “When Jarrow got free, she fried the cameras. I’ll be sending you a bill for new equipment. Isn’t it about time we went digital anyway?”

“I’ll start passing the hat around,” Marla said, sighing. It was tough getting the other sorcerers to give money to the Blackwing Institute. They all acknowledged the necessity of its existence, but none of them liked to be reminded that sometimes sorcerers went crazy. But she would try, and if they wouldn’t pony up, she’d dip into her own coffers. Being chief sorcerer of Felport had a lot of benefits, and those benefits produced more revenue than she needed anyway. She sometimes thought about funding Husch entirely from her personal funds, but that would set a bad precedent, damn it—the other sorcerers needed to pay their share, too. It was only fair.

“Can you get Genevieve back?” Husch said. “I’m worried about her.”

“I’m worried about everybody with her on the loose. Yeah, I’ll see what I can do. We have the photo, and we have her scarf, and I know about the orange trees…that’s probably enough to work with.” She took Husch’s arm, turned it over to look at the watch face under the woman’s wrist, and grunted. “Rondeau!” He was poking through Husch’s bookshelves, which included a rather impressive selection of erotica among the more staid volumes. “Let’s go! We’ve got a meeting!” She actually had a while before the appointment, but she’d had enough of country life.

“Oh?” Husch said. “Who are you meeting?”

“New guy in town. I might hire him.” She was reluctant to say more. Secrets were her habit anyway, and the existence of this particular prospective employee was more secret than usual. So far, none of the other sorcerers in the city knew the beautiful boy existed, and she wanted to keep it that way. Husch looked inclined to press—she was nosy by nature—but Rondeau spoke.

“Hey,” he said, holding up a slim book with a red cover. “Can I borrow this?”

Husch raised an eyebrow. “That is a facsimile edition of the handwritten pornography Anaïs Nin produced for her patron. It is incalculably rare.” She plucked it from his fingers. “No, you can’t borrow it. Use the Internet. There should be enough pornography there even for you.”

Rondeau grinned. “That time we went out, you told me I should be more intellectual. I’m just trying to improve myself.”

“I believe I actually said, ‘You’re an idiot,’” Husch replied. “It’s not quite the same thing.”

“I’ve got high hopes for you crazy kids,” Marla said. “Now let’s go.”

R
ondeau drove back to Felport at a more sedate pace, seeming to take some delight in the wintry landscapes unrolling past them—the bare snowy fields, the icy ponds, the trees sparkling with frost. The main road back to the city was mostly plowed, with mountains of snow piled up on either side, much cleaner than the snow heaps that lined the streets in Marla’s city—those were the ugly brown of car exhaust, when they weren’t the black of a thousand tromping snow boots. God, she missed Felport, and she’d been gone only for the morning. Being out here under this open sky triggered Marla’s agoraphobia. She missed the comfort of buildings and brick walls and chain-link fences. The morning hadn’t been a waste of time, exactly, but it was
annoying,
and she had things to do. Better get her head back in the game.

“Rondeau, I need you to call Langford when we get back home. Maybe he can come up with a way to sniff out Genevieve.”

“Why not call Gregor?” Rondeau said. “He’s Mr. Omens-and-auguries, right? Couldn’t he just swing a razor on a string over a map or something and find her?”

“Fuck Gregor. He hasn’t returned my calls in a week. He’s been a pain in my ass for years, and I don’t want to owe him any favors. He’s supposed to meet with me and the rest of the muckety-mucks about disbursing Susan Wellstone’s property. If I ask him for help today, I might have to give him something good next week. I know he’s had his eye on Susan’s penthouse, and the apartment building under it.” Susan had been one of Felport’s most prominent sorcerers, but she’d relocated last month to take a leading role in San Francisco’s magical underworld. She’d taken her personal possessions with her, but her property and business interests in the city were to be distributed among the other important sorcerers. And, as first among equals, Marla was in charge of doing the distributing, which meant she could have a
lot
of people owing her favors in a few days…and a lot of people seriously pissed about not getting what they wanted. Susan was probably laughing her ass off on the West Coast. She’d never liked Marla much.

“I’d look good in Susan’s penthouse,” Rondeau said.

Marla snorted. “The building’s full of booby traps. I doubt she deactivated all of them, either. Leaving a few would be her idea of a joke. You’d wind up splattered on the ceiling. Besides, you’re more in the way of a family retainer than a big bad sorcerer. I’d never hear the end of it if I gave you something prime.”

Rondeau didn’t seem to take offense, but then, he’d often said sidekicks got the best view of the action. “Okay, so you’ll call Langford when you get back.”

She sighed. “No,
you’ll
call Langford, and then you’ll drive me over to meet this new guy, Joshua Kindler—”

“No can do. The ladies’ toilets in my club are all clogged, and I need to get them fixed before we open tonight.”

“Rondeau. What’s more important? Your toilets, or the fate of the world?”

He scowled. “Don’t give me that. Every little thing you need doesn’t involve the fate of the world. You tried that line on me last week when you needed your laundry done. You can catch a cab to see this Joshua guy, you know.”

Marla slouched down in the passenger seat. She had been leaning on Rondeau a lot lately, sometimes for rather trivial shit. But she couldn’t help it. This upcoming disbursement of Susan’s property had taken a lot of her attention. Some of the sorcerers were resorting to sweet talk, while others were making subtle threats. They all knew Marla wasn’t to be trifled with, but she’d been chief sorcerer of Felport for only three years, very much a late arrival to the corridors of power. Most of the other sorcerers had been squabbling among themselves and running things in Felport for decades. There were a lot of complicated relationships to consider, and handing out Susan’s holdings without setting off feuds was going to be delicate. Marla had risen to her position through her willingness to do dirty jobs, her talent for making quick decisions, and her unrivaled ability to flatten those who opposed her—not because she was good at negotiating or making people happy. Diplomacy was alien to her, and though her consiglieri, Hamil, was trying to teach her, the lessons, combined with her usual responsibilities, didn’t leave much time to deal with minor problems. “Fuck, Rondeau, what am I supposed to
do
? I forgot to eat yesterday, you know? I need help.”

“You saying you’re in over your head?”

“I can handle the important stuff. It’s just…”

“The less important stuff. Laundry. Phone calls. Making sure you eat. Right?”

“Right.”

“You need a personal assistant,” Rondeau said. “Why waste a man of my talents on things like that?”

“Huh.” She’d never considered hiring a p.a., but it wasn’t like she couldn’t afford to pay someone to keep her shit straight. Money wasn’t an issue these days, but she’d spent too many years sleeping rough and living cheap to remember that. “That’s not a bad idea. We just have to find somebody. And quick. I’m only going to get busier in the next few days.”

Rondeau scratched his chin. “There’s some loose apprentices rolling around who haven’t joined up with the Honeyed Knots or the Four Tree Gang. I could ask—”

“No, I don’t want some little cantrip-throwing climber who wants to improve his own status by standing next to me. Constantly bugging me for pointers and trying to steal my magical talismans, which he’ll refuse to believe I don’t even
use.
I need somebody who doesn’t care about this business at all.”

Rondeau groaned. “You want an
ordinary
? And how do we explain it to her when, like, blood starts dripping from the ceiling, or some out-of-towner crackling with eldritch energies comes around looking for trouble?”

Marla shrugged. “It’s not like that stuff happens daily. We’ll deal with it when it happens. You’d rather have a wannabe sorcerer in your club, who knows just enough to be dangerous? The place could wind up a smoking crater in the ground because some ex-apprentice tried to light a cigarette with magic instead of a match.”

“Fine, okay, hire an ordinary. But don’t expect me to nurse her through her rude awakening when she realizes the world is full of mysterious horrors and et cetera.”

“Great. Line up some interviews.”

Rondeau swore. “I thought this was supposed to make
less
work for me. What, do I just put a notice in the classifieds? Take out an ad on Craigslist?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Marla said.

“Maybe an ad that says something like ‘Attractive eighteen-to twenty-two-year-old woman sought for demanding position—’”

“
No,”
Marla said. “Get a man. I don’t need you sexually harassing my assistant.” She paused. “Better make it an
ugly
man. I know you.”

“You just took all the fun out of this.”

She grinned. “At least this way you can concentrate on unclogging your toilet instead of doing my laundry.”

“You do have a way of putting things in perspective.”

An hour later they reached the outskirts of Felport, its ungainly skyline filling the horizon. Marla relaxed, tension in her shoulders bleeding away. This was her city. She was bound to it, sworn to protect it, and leaving it even for a morning made her antsy. Her trip to San Francisco the month before on life-or-death business had only intensified her desire to stay close to home. She’d found her life’s purpose in the decaying rust-belt grandeur of Felport, and she loved every dank alley and dirty rooftop of the place.

“Maybe
you
forget to eat, but I could go for a burger,” Rondeau said. “Want to stop by Smitty’s for a bite before we head back in?”

Marla glanced skyward. It was a bright clear cold day, and the sun stood just past noon. She had a little time before she was supposed to meet the beautiful boy Hamil had found. “Sure.”

Rondeau pulled into the parking lot at Smitty’s, an old-school diner that had once served a busy railroad crowd, back when Felport was more of a hub for trains. Now the tracks were mostly torn up, and only old-timers came to Smitty’s. Marla took her leather shoulder bag with her. She hated lugging the thing, but it contained her cloak, her dagger of office, the sense-annihilating stones, and miscellaneous bits of personal ordnance. Not stuff she could leave in the Bentley. Any thieves who tried to boost the car would have an unpleasant experience ahead of them, but better safe, especially in this part of town.

Marla and Rondeau sat at the worn counter and ordered from the surprisingly sprightly waitress, who kept the coffee coming without prompting. By the end of the meal Marla was almost content. Sure, there was a crazy psychic fugitive on the loose, but Marla could track her down. She’d recruit the beautiful boy, who would help with delicate negotiations, and hire a personal assistant to ease some of the pressure on her. Things would work out.