Poison Sleep (25 page)

“I hope so,” Marla said. “If we find Genevieve before Reave does, yeah. I’m just glad Langford is better at divination than Gregor is.”

They rode down to the lobby, Hamil lamenting the likely loss of his meat-golems, hoping they might survive in enough of a state to stumble home. Their death would be traumatic to their operators, too. As they left the building, Marla’s phone rang; it was Joshua.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“I had to promise Reave I’d sit at his right hand when he takes over the world, but yes, I’m okay. Are you out?”

“We just left the building.”

“I’m halfway downstairs now. I convinced Reave that he can destroy you at his leisure, and told him I’d meet him later.” He paused. “Men really will believe
anything,
won’t they?”

“You’re a treasure. Come back to the club as soon as you can.” She snapped her phone shut. “That wasn’t exactly a win,” she said, climbing into the Bentley. “But we haven’t lost yet.”

“Yeah, yeah, Joshua is the greatest guy ever, even though he totally ignored your order to leave, and never mind that I got spider crab squid goop all over my pants,” Rondeau said. He sighed. “Of course, the worst thing is, whenever I see Joshua, I think he really
is
the greatest guy ever.”

“Jealousy is such an ugly thing,” Marla said. “Envy, too.”

Nicolette hid with her boss in their deepest subbasement, the equivalent of a well-appointed bomb shelter. “That was close,” she said, working on Gregor’s knee. Her chaos magic wasn’t
just
about increasing disorder, it was about
shifting
disorder, and tilting the balance. She drained off the chaos of his shattered knee into a series of highly ordered crystals piled in the corner. As the crystals shattered and snapped into dust, his knee jumped back into place, his wounds knitting, stealing the order from the crystals. It worked fast—Nicolette was positively thrumming with power. There was a
lot
of uncertainty for her to feed on in the current situation in Felport.

Gregor grunted as his knee realigned. “There’s no turning back now,” he said, flexing the leg. “Marla knows I’m her enemy, and I’m sure she’ll get word to the other sorcerers soon. If Reave doesn’t win…” He shook his head. “He
has
to win. We have to find Genevieve before Marla does.”

“We can’t outpredict Langford,” Nicolette said. “He does some seriously weird mojo, you know? I don’t know how we’ll locate Genevieve before he does.”

“I know I can’t predict where Genevieve will be as accurately as Langford can,” Gregor said, “but I can predict
what Langford will predict.
”

Nicolette frowned. “You taught me yourself that you can’t predict predictions—even trying to do so introduces too much uncertainty into the system, and the results are lousy, worse than plain guessing would be. Right?”

“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “Trying to predict someone else’s divination does lead to great uncertainty. But I have
you,
my dear, to draw that uncertainty away, dump it somewhere unimportant, and replace it with certainty. Yes?”

“That’s…” She was going to say that was too difficult for her, the equivalent of making the falling rocks in an avalanche land to form an exact scale replica of Buckingham Palace, but was it really beyond her?

“You’re stronger than me now,” Gregor said, matter-of-factly. “You’re rising up on the madness in this city like you’re riding a geyser. You have the power.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I can do that.”

“Do what?” Reave said, appearing, as he did, from nowhere.

“Is Marla dead?” Gregor asked. He was getting cabin fever, Nicolette supposed, and was tired of staying in his building, where he was safe. She glanced at his bare knee. Well, relatively safe.

“Not yet,” Reave said, flicking his hand as if the issue was of no consequence. “What is it you said you can do?”

“We can find Genevieve before Marla does. Tomorrow afternoon.” Gregor’s voice was weary, and Nicolette felt an unexpected pang of pity for him. She shoved it away. There was no room in her life for pity right now.

“Good,” Reave said. “I’m going to try storming her castle now.”

“Why?” Nicolette said. “We told you, we can get her tomorrow, and you know you’ll never break into her palace.”

“I will not answer a
woman,
” Reave said. “Dare to question me again and I’ll skewer you, however useful Gregor thinks you are.”

Nicolette regarded him coldly. If this was the new world order, it did not agree with her.

“I’m curious, too,” Gregor said. “Why waste your energies on a fruitless attack?”

“I attack her every night,” Reave said. “Why let her know anything has changed? Besides, I don’t waste my energies. Every time I assault her palace, she becomes more afraid of me, and I grow more powerful. When I have her locked up in a room, to torment at my leisure…” He shivered, clearly delighted by anticipation, and Nicolette shuddered in disgust. “My power will only grow, and the world will be made over in my image.”

“All cheesy dark towers and nightmare armies like a little kid would be afraid of?” Nicolette said, incredulous. “
You’re
going to rule the world? What kind of economic system are you going to implement? How are you going to deal with sewage? Road maintenance? Health care for your slaves? What are you going to do for food? I know you’re bringing your dream stuff into this world, but this world isn’t going to turn into the dream world completely. There’s practical matters to—”

“Silence!” Reave roared, but Nicolette only fell silent when Gregor put his hand on her shoulder.

“I will have her head on a pike,” Reave said.

“No you won’t,” Gregor said. “Behave yourself. You need us.” To Nicolette he said, “You have a point, of course, but it’s something we’ve considered. He needs
me
to help him run things, Nicolette, and I need you. All right? You’ll always have a place with me.”

Reave spat and turned away.

“The feeling’s mutual, asshole,” Nicolette said, and Reave vanished into the shadows.

Z
ealand woke on a white daybed in a room filled with yellow light. He smelled oranges. Genevieve sat beside him, her hands clasped in her lap, her head cocked to the side, watching him.

“I’m not dead,” Zealand said, reaching tentatively to touch the place on his back where Reave’s knives had gone in. The wounds felt…strange.

“The mold saved you,” St. John Austen said, coming in through a doorway Zealand hadn’t noticed before (perhaps it hadn’t existed before). “It filled in your wounds. For all I know it took over the function of your kidneys. The stuff is part of you now, not just armor, but flesh.”

Zealand considered that. Perhaps it should have repulsed him, but it didn’t. He was merely glad to be alive. “Then I owe Genevieve a great debt for giving me such a gift.”

“You fought him,” she said, eyes wide. “You really fought him.”

Zealand sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He felt fine, really, a bit tired, a bit sore, but not at all as if he’d been skewered through both kidneys. “For all the good it did. I’m afraid I couldn’t do much to him on his own ground, he controlled the rules of reality there, and—”

“You
fought
him,” Genevieve said again, and reached out, as if to touch his face, though she let her hand fall before making contact.

“Genevieve is still a bit astonished at the notion that Reave
can
be fought, that you were brave enough to face him,” Austen explained.

Zealand shrugged. “He’s only a man. Not
even
a man, I realize now, just an idea of a man with delusions of independent reality.” He remembered. “Good Lord, did he hurt Marla? We were supposed to work together to stop him, but I was attacked before the plan could go into effect.” He grimaced. “She’ll think I deserted her for sure.”

“You were trying to help Marla Mason?” Mr. Austen was alarmed, and Genevieve stood up and backed away.

“You misunderstand her,” Zealand said. “She has had a change of heart. She no longer wishes Genevieve’s death. I don’t believe she ever
wished
it—she just thought it might be unavoidable. She wants to help you now, Genevieve, and stop Reave, and all the terrible things happening in her city. That’s what she told me, and I believe her. She swore an unbreakable oath.”

St. John Austen frowned. “She wants to lock Genevieve up again, you mean, sedate her, keep her in this dream world forever.”

Zealand spread his hands helplessly. “Isn’t that what Genevieve wants? I thought she was only vulnerable when she woke up in the real world? Here, she can hold him off indefinitely, yes?”

“That’s no way to live, Zealand, cowering here in her palace,” Austen said. “She wants Reave
gone.
She wants her life back, but she never believed that was possible until she saw you attack him.”

Genevieve wandered away, leaving them alone. Zealand sighed. “No offense—I’m rather fond of her—but she’s
mad,
Austen. Isn’t it best if she’s confined someplace where she can’t hurt herself, or others? Because Reave attacking her…in a way, that’s just her hurting herself. He only has the power she gives him.”

Austen shook his head. “She can’t bear it anymore. Something shocked her, woke her up in that hospital, but she could have stayed, could have let the doctor come and give her a shot to calm her down. But she chose to act, to try to effect a change. She doesn’t even know how long she was in that hospital.
I
don’t know. Seeing you actually fight Reave…it had a great impact on her. You don’t spend time with her like I do, but I see the change, she’s more lucid, more interested, more
hopeful.
She thinks of him as an unstoppable nightmare, but if we can chip away at that image, let her know Reave
can
be beaten, it may help her finally purge his presence from her mind.”

“Marla could help with fighting Reave, assuming he hasn’t killed her already,” Zealand said. “She’s very formidable.”

Austen shook his head. “Genevieve doesn’t trust her. She tried to trust Marla Mason, tried to enlist her as a champion, but Marla had murder on her mind…you must understand, Genevieve doesn’t trust easily. She saw something in you, I don’t know what, something in the shape of your dreams, something that made her believe you might put her needs first. But Marla would
never
put Genevieve’s needs first. If Genevieve had wandered to Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Milwaukee instead of Felport, Marla wouldn’t care in the slightest.”

“I can’t argue with that. But circumstance makes strange allies, Austen. I think we should meet with Marla.”

“Try convincing Genevieve,” he said with a shrug. “In the meantime, she’d like you to stay here, to protect her against Reave. He’ll be attacking soon.”

“How do you know?”

Austen looked at him strangely. “He attacks every night, Zealand. He’s the king of her nightmares.”

At the club, Marla checked in with Langford one more time—Zealand had vanished again, he said, but things were on track with finding Genevieve—and made Rondeau and Ted eat something. She sat on the couch in her office and listened to the radio, filled with late-night advisories for the oncoming blizzard, which the border wardens were even now whipping up magically. The things at the borders were not human, but were imbued with minds, and drew power from Marla’s own energies to protect the city—they weren’t some great magic of hers personally, but rather a protection set up long ago that came with her job. Even so, the weight of their work made her tired, and as the snow fell thicker and heavier and snowplows on the edge of town suffered mysterious breakdowns and phone lines fell under the weight of sudden icicles, she slumped deeper and deeper into the cushions. She had to sleep. Sleeping here was not ideal. She should, at the very least, fold the sofa out into a bed. But getting up was too much trouble.

Tonight had gone badly. She knew “plan” was just a four-letter word for something that doesn’t work, but she’d been hopeful. Maybe Zealand’s presence would have tipped the scales in their favor, and they could have taken Reave apart. Now Zealand had run away, or betrayed her, or been killed by Nicolette and Gregor—who knew?

Someone entered the room, and Marla opened her eyes. It was Joshua, cheeks red from the cold, smile warm as a hearth. She reached out to him and pulled him down to the couch with her, and they nestled together, snugly, for a few moments.

“Did I do good tonight?” he asked, and Marla knew she’d been playing this right all along—because who else in the
world
would Joshua ever feel the need to ask
approval
from? She was opposed to playing games in relationships, both on principle and because it seemed like a waste of time, but if aloofness was the only way to make Joshua see her as more than another toy to use and send on her way, she’d keep it up.

She kissed his forehead. “You did really good.” Deep down, though, part of her rankled at her own retreat. Maybe she
could
have reached Reave and cut him down. It might have been pointless—maybe he had a whole mushroom-grove of new bodies waiting for him to put on like fresh clothes—but it might have bought them some time. The meat-golems and Rondeau had been holding his monsters back. She could have killed Reave, she thought. But Joshua had seen her fall, and come to save her, and she could hardly fault him for that. “So you, what, professed your love for him?”

“Oh, I just told him I saw which way the wind was blowing, that I thought it was clear his side was going to win, and that he shouldn’t even worry about you, that you weren’t important, he could deal with you later. I get the feeling he doesn’t have a very high opinion of women. I told him I’d join him after he won.”

“Wow,” Marla said. “And he believed you. I wasn’t sure something like
him
would be susceptible to your charms.”

“Oh, all men and women love me, Marla,” he said, snuggling in closer. “Being mostly imaginary is no defense.”

“I can’t imagine what it must be like to have your power. Some of the most important formative relationships in my
life
are based on hatred. Hamil says that pride is my engine, that I’m just too proud to
fail,
but before I had anything to be proud of, it was hate that drove me. Hate that let me leave my fucked-up family, hate that made me take a job waitressing in a topless bar—I hated men back then, so it pleased me to pretend to like them and take their money.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how I would have lived a life of love, love, love.”