Poison Sleep (31 page)

“I’m sorry, boss,” Nicolette said. “I just heard from one of Reave’s runners. He managed to kill Zealand, but Marla and Ernesto escaped.”

“All right, then. Time to tip our hand. Have our spy kill Marla.”

Nicolette shook her head. “I don’t think he can. They’re hunkered down, and in close quarters…the time isn’t right. He’s with us to a point, but he’s not dedicated to you the way I am—he won’t kill Marla unless he can do it without getting killed himself. With Hamil there, and Rondeau…it would be a death sentence. Assuming he could even succeed. I mean, Marla just got out of Reave’s tower in one piece. She didn’t die when I set her on
fire
. She’s a tough broad, you gotta give her that.”

“If I have to stay in this tower for much longer, Nicolette, I may walk out and take my chances with death.” She’d never seen Gregor like this, so pale and demoralized, and she felt something like contempt. She was bursting with power now, and he seemed weaker than he’d ever been. “I never went out much. I was always content to stay here with my studies, but now that I
can’t
leave, I want nothing more. You know, I never wanted the crown—heavy lies the head, and all that. Nor do I much look forward to being Reave’s administrator. He will not be a popular ruler. But I was pushed into this situation by circumstance—I always took the path that wouldn’t end in my death. Now look at me—right-hand man to a maniac with power based on subjugation and torture. I don’t pretend to be a nice man, Nicolette, but I’ve never seen the point in being evil. Now I am in an evil man’s employ. Reave’s reign will be monstrous, and he has imperial ambitions. We may have nuclear bombs dropped on us before everything is said and done.”

Nicolette shrugged. “Nuclear detonations cause a lot of disorder. I can deal with all that.”

He waved his hand. “I know. But is that how we want to spend our time? For decades I’ve studied all the ways to see the future, and I’ve come to believe there’s no such thing as fate. I always hated that old saying ‘Fate leads him who will, and him who won’t it drags.’ But just because there’s no fate doesn’t mean there are no inevitabilities, and for all practical purposes, the result is the same. I may not be fated to serve Reave, but I have no other choice. When the Giggler said an alliance with Reave was my best chance of killing Marla, I took it. I did what I had to in order to survive. I am being dragged.”

“I’m not too fond of Reave myself,” Nicolette said. “Maybe once he disposes of Marla, we can get rid of him. The more successful he is at sowing discord, the more powerful I become, and we can model various coup and assassination scenarios until we find one that works.”

“It’s a thought,” Gregor said. “But I fear he will be too powerful for us to stop by then. In a way, Marla is our best hope for defeating him. She might manage it, too. But if she does, if she defeats him and lives…” Gregor shook his head. “If I wasn’t doomed before, I would be then. A collaborator with the enemy. Marla would execute me, and the other sorcerers of Felport would applaud. No, her death and Reave’s success are the least bad outcomes for me. We’ll have to keep supporting him.” Nicolette frowned, and Gregor sighed. “For the time being, at least. We’ll discuss the future when the future comes. All right?”

“You’re the boss,” Nicolette said.
For now
.

Marla opened the door to Rondeau’s club, and the bar area was deserted, as she’d asked. They’d all be hiding out upstairs in Rondeau’s apartment, probably, waiting for her to calm down. She didn’t think she was a particularly bad boss, but she wasn’t a good loser, and they were probably glad to be out of her way. The deference wouldn’t last forever, though. They’d be looking to her for the next plan, and she’d run out of ideas. She’d tried a few times now to stop Reave, and slammed headlong into a wall each time. Now lives had been lost. How long before her people stopped following her, before the other sorcerers declared her unfit to save Felport and forcibly removed her from office, letting the Chamberlain or Viscarro take over?

A pizza was waiting in her office. She didn’t believe for a minute any deliverymen were taking orders at the moment—it was after midnight, during a state of emergency, and there were monsters in the street—which meant Ted had reheated some of the food from this morning for her. He was a good assistant. She hoped there was enough left of her to be worth assisting when this was all over. As she ate, she slumped on the couch, and tried to think. She looked at the chessboard, paused in the middle of the last game she’d played with Ted.

What had Ted said? That tactics always lost to strategy in the long run? She’d disagreed at the time, but maybe he was right. Her tactics had been fine—she was in good fighting form, and so were her allies. But Reave, with the help of Gregor, had managed to outthink her at every turn. They were perpetually two moves ahead. She’d been thinking of making another frontal assault—because what
else
could she do? She dealt with problems by attacking them! But maybe it was time for a different approach. She rose and stood by the chessboard, moving a couple of pieces, then moving them back. The game wasn’t a perfect metaphor for life, but she could learn something from it, maybe. She opened the door and said, “Guys, come out here!”

The door to Rondeau’s bedroom opened, and he emerged, followed by Hamil, Joshua, and Ted. They all looked exhausted as they gathered around the battered table.

“Reave was ahead of me,” she said. “He knew I was coming—I can only assume Gregor made a good prediction, or else I’m just naturally that predictable.”
Or else one of you is a traitor,
she thought miserably, but all she could do about that was watch for suspicious behavior. “Zealand gave his life trying to save Genevieve. Ernesto got away, and I assume he’s gone to ground in his junkyard. And I’m here.” She spread her hands. “Tactics have failed me. We need some strategy.” She went into the office and returned, dropping the pizza on the table. “Let’s all eat, and talk. I need some lateral thinking here. My brain has some good moves in its repertoire, but I need people who can think in different circles, and that’s you guys. Think about our situation. What the hell can we
do
?”

“We could give up the city,” Hamil said, and at Marla’s startled stare, he shrugged. “I’m just talking. We
do
have last-resort contingencies in place. We can teleport the entire populace a few miles away and seal off the city entirely. The border guards can jerk the whole place several dimensions out of phase. Cutting out a cancer is sometimes the only way to save the body, even if it means sacrificing some surrounding healthy tissue.”

“No,” Marla said. “I’d kill Genevieve and take my
own
death as punishment for oath-breaking before I’d give up this city. It’s
my place
. Other ideas?”

“I can go to Reave and offer to be his, ah, boy bride,” Joshua said. “It would at the very least distract him.”

Marla considered. “I don’t want to send you into that kind of danger. He’d never let you go, and then he’d have
two
hostages whose lives I value, so that’s not really a win. Besides, we don’t know where Gregor and Nicolette are in all this, but I believe they’re still a factor. Distracting Reave only helps up to a point.” She looked at Ted, who was silent, and the horrible worry that he might be a spy returned. Why wasn’t he contributing? Didn’t he
want
them to succeed? “Ted,” she said finally. “I’ve seen you making a lot of phone calls lately, and you’ve been distracted. What have you been working on?” Surreptitiously, she touched a few wads of chewing gum stuck in a specific pattern on the underside of the table, activating a short-lived tattletale spell. If Ted told a lie, the table would knock and rock and tilt like a prop at a’séance.

“I had a surprise for you,” he said, and the table didn’t move. “I thought it would be a nice way to celebrate your defeating Reave, but now I feel like an idiot for wasting the time.”

“What kind of surprise?”

“You mentioned that you wished you could get Terry Reeves—the man who assaulted Genevieve—so you could make him pay for what he’d done. It seemed reasonable to me that if he’d raped one woman, he might have raped another, so I looked on the sex-offender database, and found a man by that name who was recently released from prison, and who still lives in Felport. I found a photo, and he even looks like Reave a little—bald, dead little eyes, ugly teeth. I was going to send a couple of your pet police to pick him up and bring him over. I thought it could help Genevieve’s therapy, to know that her
real
rapist had been punished. I’m sorry I took on a project like that without—”

“Wait,” Hamil said. “You found her rapist? You know where he is
right now
?”

“Well, yes,” Ted said. “I guess he was never apprehended for the attack on Genevieve because she was catatonic. She never told anyone his name before—she still hasn’t, St. John Austen told us. Genevieve probably can’t even bring herself to
say
his name, though she was inside his mind, so it’s no surprise she knew it.”

“Marla,” Hamil said. “I had no idea that man was still at large. But if he’s local…”

“Holy shit,” Marla said, rising. “Ted, you’re a fucking
genius
. You’re also an idiot for not mentioning this sooner, but even subtracting that idiocy from your score, you’re
still
a genius. Where is this guy? We need him.”

“Why?” Joshua said. “I don’t understand.”

She patted him on the head. “You don’t have to understand, sweetheart, you just have to know it’s
beautiful
. Ted, what’s the address?” He checked his
PDA
and read it out. The place was in a shitty part of town, but they weren’t too far from the shitty part of town, so that was all right. “Ted, you and Joshua stay here, man the phones, let me know if anything develops. Hamil, Rondeau, come with me.”

“This could really work,” Hamil said. “I need to give it some thought, figure out how exactly to proceed…. We should go to Langford’s. He’ll have anything we’d possibly need.”

“Done,” Marla said. Real hope was surging in her now.

“I’m glad I could help,” Ted said. “Will you tell me
how
I helped?”

“After we’ve saved the city from devastation,” Marla said.

“Can I come?” Joshua said.

Marla hesitated. She didn’t want to leave his side, either—she’d missed him. “We’ll have a celebratory romp if this works, Joshua. For now, I need you here. The bad guys might come knocking, and you’re the only one who can sweet-talk them away from the door.”

“If you think that’s where I’d be most useful,” Joshua said, sounding a little put out. She almost relented, but damn it, she was
right
. She could nurse his hurt feelings later. While wearing a nurse uniform, if that’s what he wanted.

“We’ll call when we finish,” Marla said, and hustled Hamil and Rondeau toward the elevator. For once, Hamil moved faster than any of them. And why not? He was the one with the skills to take advantage of Ted’s fortuitous find, though Marla would have to handle the tricky bits. That was okay. She liked the tricky bits.

In the car, on the way to Terry Reeves’s house, Hamil leaned forward from the backseat and touched Marla’s shoulder. “I want to make sure you understand how dangerous this is,” he said quietly. If Rondeau could hear, he pretended not to. “If it goes wrong, if Reave doesn’t react as we hope…you and Genevieve could
both
die, simultaneously.”

Marla nodded, reaching back to pat his knee. “I know, big guy. But that’s the kind of situation we’re in. Finding Terry Reeves, having him in town…it’s almost enough to make me believe in providence. At the very least, it’s big luck. If it comes with big risks, well, so it goes. At least this will be decisive.”

“True enough,” Hamil murmured, and sank back into the seat.

Marla kicked in the door of the shitty little house on Rampart Street. Terry Reeves sat in a recliner in dirty boxer shorts, watching TV with a beer in his hand. His eyes went wide. “Get the fuck out of my house!”

“Terry Reeves?” Marla said, though there was no question—he was a less pale but equally bald version of Reave, with bushier eyebrows and an older face.

“It’s none of your business who I am, bitch!”

“Oh, good, you are a total asshole,” she said. “I won’t feel bad about doing this, then.” She tossed a fist-sized river rock at him, and he threw up his hands to ward it off. When it touched him, though, he dropped like a stone himself, totally unconscious. “He’ll have a monster headache when he wakes up, and I can’t say I mind.”

Rondeau came in and sighed. “I always wind up doing the heavy lifting.” He dragged Terry toward the door, wrinkling his nose. “Man, he stinks.” Marla picked up Reeves’s feet, and they hurried toward the waiting Bentley. Hamil took up most of the backseat, but that was okay, because they were sticking Terry in the trunk. They dumped him on top of the spare tire and the jack, and Rondeau hesitated before closing the lid. “Uh, Marla, are you really planning on killing this guy?”

“It could go that way,” she admitted. “I’m not sure, but if it’s a choice between him dying or having to kill Genevieve, who should win? A serial rapist, or one of his victims
and
me?”

“No argument there,” Rondeau said, and shut the lid. “The cold-murder thing never sits well with me, but I understand having to make bad choices. I just…I kinda worry….”

“I’m not looking forward to doing it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Marla said. “I think this guy should be castrated and put in a box forever, but I don’t believe in killing anyone unless there’s no other way to protect the innocent, you know that. And unless you’re a sorcerer, a supermax prison is a pretty good way to make sure you never fuck over another innocent.”

“You’re doing good,” Rondeau said. “I haven’t had a chance to say that, and I know a lot of things have gone sideways these last couple of days, but you’re doing good.”

“Me and you should go have some breakfast when this all blows over,” Marla said. “You can buy me a danish and tell me how awesome I am some more.”