Queen of Nothing (Marla Mason Book 9) (8 page)

“You sure you don’t want me to go?” Marzi said.

Bradley shook his head. “I don’t even want
Pelham
to go. Travel by mirror is so risky that even people brave enough to teleport tend to avoid it. If you’re unlucky with teleporting, you get maimed or you die. If you’re unlucky with travel by mirror, you just
wish
you were dead. And sometimes, the person who comes out of the mirror isn’t the person who went
in
. Cole says my natural ability to see through illusions should keep me relatively safe, but for anybody else, it’s very easy to get... lost. You don’t need to come, Pelham, really—I can handle it.”

“If there is a chance that Mrs. Mason is on the other side of that glass, then I am going.” Pelham was the definition of unflappable, so Bradley shrugged.

“Okay then. Marzi, kill the lights. Keep the candles burning while we’re gone, all right? And Pelly, stay close to me.”

Pelham rose and joined him, putting a hand on his right shoulder. Bradley stared into the mirrors, letting his eyes blur, looking past his own reflection and into the lighted depths: a sky full of stars, a sea full of luminous fish. He didn’t let himself blink, and as his eyes watered, the view before him softened further. Bradley took one deliberate step forward, and then another, and then another, until he passed the point where he should have crashed into the glass.

As a little kid, he’d seen a cartoon about a little boy who walked through a mirror into a world on the other side. It wasn’t an adaptation of
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There
—it had definitely involved a little boy, and not a girl, though Bradley couldn’t remember much else about it, certainly not what the world beyond the mirror had been like. Despite occasional attempts at research on the internet, he’d never been able to track down the name of the show, either because it was too obscure, or because his unreliable memory muddled the details too badly. The program had made a big impression on him, though, or at least one moment had: the boy, reaching out, hands touching the glass, which rippled like water, and let him pass through. Bradley had spent a lot of hours trying to push through the mirror hanging on the back of his mom’s bedroom door, always frustrated, desperate to discover a magic that eluded him. The failure of that mirror to yield was his earliest, purest memory of disappointment.

And now, he was through the looking glass. There was no magical world on the other side, though. Just a hall of mirrors, the walls reflecting him and Pelham, and countless candle flames, though the actual candles were no longer in evidence. He looked behind him, and felt a flutter of panic, because there were just more mirrors and corridors back there: no sign of the hotel room, or Marzi, or anywhere else. The candles seemed to brighten, and he narrowed his eyes, growing lightheaded.

“Mr. Bowman.” Pelham squeezed his shoulder, hard. “I believe we should proceed forward, and to the left.”

“What?” Bradley blinked, and some of his reflections blinked too, though others laughed silently, and others snarled, and one pounded on the glass with bloody fists like a prisoner trying to escape a transparent cage.

“I will show you.” Pelham stepped around Bradley, taking his hand, and leading him seemingly at random.
His
reflections all behaved themselves, merely mimicking his calm progress, though Bradley’s reflections continued to twist, writhe, cavort, and bellow voicelessly. Some of them bent to blow out candles, or snuffed the flames between fingertips, plunging whole infinite sections of the hall of mirrors into darkness. Somewhere in the distance came the crash and tinkle of breaking glass and falling shards, but Pelham continued plodding along, choosing corridors and crossings with barely any hesitation, moving them along.

Something touched the back of Bradley’s neck, and he spun around, only to come face-to-face with himself—but this version of him smiled, showing teeth that were shards of broken mirror. The mirror-fanged Bradley reached out and closed his hands around Bradley’s throat, smiling as he throttled him—but then Pelham was there, reaching past Bradley to punch the mirror-monster in the face. The blow might have broken a human’s nose, but the monster’s face
shattered
, and where the creature had been, there was only a scattering of silvered glass on the dusty black floor.

Pelham grabbed Bradley’s hand and pulled him, dragging him through the hall of mirrors, until they reached an open window set halfway up the wall, revealing a derelict bathroom beyond. “Go!” Pelham whispered, pushing him toward the window, and despite his fuzzy head, Bradley obeyed, clambering through the waist-high square and falling onto a filthy tile floor beside a cracked toilet. He looked up at the mirrored medicine cabinet he’d passed through, the glass miraculously intact.

A moment later Pelham
leapt
through the mirror, landing inelegantly beside the clawfoot bathtub. Bradley staggered to his feet and looked at the medicine cabinet. Three versions of himself stood behind the glass, snarling with mirrored teeth, but then they shimmered, and it was only his own reflection, wide-eyed and dazed-looking.

Pelham rose, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and began binding up his left hand.

“Are you all right?” Bradley said.

“One of them slashed me across the palm,” Pelham said. “But it is a minor wound, of no consequence.”

“I don’t know what happened in there.” Bradley sat on the edge of the tub, still feeling shaky, but more lucid now. “Cole told me it was a place of illusions, and he thought my ability to see clearly would protect me, but I guess he was wrong.”

“I believe Mr. Cole underestimated the other element of your power,” Pelham said. “You act as a catalyst, to intensify magic, isn’t that right? In your presence, ghosts sometimes gain material substance, and you can summon oracles to manifest even when they possess only the most tenuous of links to our reality.”

“Shit. So those creatures of reflection behind the mirror became more than light and shadow in my presence—they became more real.”

“I believe they wished to take your reality for their own, yes.”

“How did you manage to lead us, though?”

Pelham shrugged. “I was there when you discussed your plan to travel by mirror with Mr. Cole.” Pelham had been working as Cole’s private secretary, and was apparently so adept at his job that Cole already couldn’t imagine running San Francisco’s magical underworld without him. “He said the key was to remain focused on one’s destination, because there are many mirrors in the world, many reflections, and it is easy to become lost. I am... very good at remaining focused.”

“I owe you, Pelly.” He looked around. “So this is where Jason’s holed up, huh?”

Jason Mason stepped into the doorway, a pistol pointed at them. “That’s right. And it’s where I’m going to dig a hole to bury you two. Or, wait, maybe I’ll get you to dig the hole. Less work for me then.”

Bradley sighed and stared hard at Jason, who blinked and swore, swinging the gun to and fro, looking around the room wildly. Bradley put a finger to his lips, then stood up and stepped to one side, preparing to slip around Jason’s flank.

Pelham was faster, though, darting forward and grabbing Jason’s gun hand, twisting, and taking the gun from him. Jason grunted and tried to run, but Bradley tripped him up, and Jason fell in a heap. “God
damn
it,” he said. “I hate magic. Turning invisible? You fuckers don’t play fair.”

Bradley released his pressure on Jason’s mind. “We weren’t invisible. I just made it so you couldn’t see us.” Tricks like that were almost useless against sorcerers—even the greenest apprentice knew how to shield her mind from such psychic attacks—but for all his formidable qualities, Jason had no defenses against magic.

Pelham stood over him, gun held loosely at his side. “Mr. Mason. We’re looking for your sister.”

Jason sat up. “Yeah, I figured. Mind if I stand?”

“I think you’re good on the floor.”

Jason grunted and leaned against the wall. He was as handsome as ever, if a bit wolfish, and his usual cocksure smirk was already reasserting itself, but he’d clearly been living rough: his shirt was stained, his jacket rumpled, his hair sticking up, his jaw blued by stubble. “You know, I was
just
about ready to come out of hiding?”

“Your sister, Mr. Mason. Where is she?”

“I don’t know, Pelham. You don’t still hold a grudge about that time I held you hostage, do you? I ask, because it seems like our roles are reversed now, and I’ll remind you, I was pretty good to you.”

“You did not treat me unkindly,” Pelham said. “I will give you the same courtesy, if you answer my questions. If not...”

“Who knew tiny butlers could sound so threatening?” Jason said. “Look, it’s just like I told Elsie Jarrow when she came calling—I don’t have any idea where Marla is. I haven’t seen her since she came to visit mom in hospice, right before she died, and that was months ago. I thought you guys
killed
Elsie, Pelham. I nearly shit myself when she showed up on my doorstep. I was afraid she was going to drag me on another murder road trip or something, and I’ve been hiding ever since, afraid she’d find me again.”

“You can’t hide from people like us,” Bradley said. “You just don’t have the resources.”

“Yeah, well, it makes me feel better to try, all right? Now that you’ve found me, and been disappointed by my total lack of information, how about you get lost?”

“Look, Jason, Elsie visited us, too. She said if we wanted to find Marla, we should find you first. Now you’re saying you haven’t seen her? You don’t know anything about her location? What did you tell Elsie?”

Jason rolled his eyes. “I told her
nothing
, all right? Look: Elsie shows up a couple few months back. She tells me she wants to find Marla, I figure because she wants to finish the job she started in Hawaii, to kill her. I didn’t have any information, and believe me, I would have spilled if I did—being Elsie’s traveling companion once was enough. Me and Marla mended fences a little bit, but I’m not gonna die to protect her. Elsie says, what was it—she says, ‘It’s okay, blood always tells.’ Then she takes out this silver knife, like a scalpel, and I thought I was dead, but she just told me to hold out my hand. Said she could pluck a hair from my head or a breath from my mouth, but that blood was more traditional. She cuts my palm, and catches the blood in a little bowl, and then she just walks off. I packed up my stuff and started hiding after that.”

“Hiding
after
Jarrow finds you is kind of a barn-door-post-horse-theft idea, Jason.”

“I don’t need your advice on how I should practice self-care.” Jason scowled. “Can I do anything
else
for you two?”

“Yeah,” Bradley said. “Some blood and hair will do it.”

Jason groaned.

Familial Tendencies

They called Marzi to relieve her of mirror-watching duty, then flew home on a plane, having had their fill of unconventional travel. The next afternoon Pelham and Bradley stood in Cole’s workshop. It was a cross between a modern chemistry lab and an ancient alchemist’s lair, sophisticated glassware and equipment mingled with fire-blackened cauldrons, antique brass instruments, and hazy crystals.

Cole took the vial containing a drop of Jason’s blood and held it up to the light of an oil lamp. “Miss Jarrow is really quite ingenious,” he said. “I’m sure some other sorcerer has thought of this approach, but it’s not a technique I’ve ever heard of.”

“You lost me.” Rondeau covered a yawn. He’d just arrived from Vegas. “What are we doing and how are we doing it?”

“You know how Big B has no trouble finding me, because my body is
his
body?” Bradley said.

Rondeau nodded. “Sure. Sympathetic magic link. The thing is the thing, the thing calls to the thing, A equals A, all that.”

“Right. One basic form of divination is blood magic, but really anything that carries DNA will do the job—hair, flesh, whatever. If you have a drop of someone’s blood, you can create a sympathetic magic link, and use the blood to locate the rest of the body.”

“But you already tried that method, along with so many others,” Pelham pointed out.

Cole nodded. “Yes. Some powerful magic—which we know now to be the work of this new god of Death—obscured Marla from us, rendering direct methods of divination ineffective. But
indirect
ones....”

“Wait,” Rondeau said. “This is like DNA testing, right? Like, paternity tests—you can compare the kid’s DNA with the dad’s and find out if they’re related.”

Bradley nodded. “A familial link. The DNA isn’t identical... but it’s similar enough, and you can examine the similarities to find out if people are siblings, or parents, or whatever.”

Cole placed a small blue glass bowl on the wooden lab table, uncapped the vial of blood, and let the sample drip inside. “So we modify the traditional divination method. Instead of using this blood to locate its owner, we attempt to locate people
related
by blood to its owner: close relatives of Jason Mason. As I said. Ingenious.” He poured a clear fluid from a beaker into the bowl, then used a wire whisk to mingle the substances. “The atlas, please?”

Bradley took a heavy leather-bound volume of maps, which had undergone its own magical preparations, and placed it on the table, closed. Cole murmured a few words, then poured the contents of the bowl onto the cover of the atlas.

Instead of resting on the cover, the fluid was absorbed into the atlas, like water disappearing into sand. Cole counted under his breath, then opened up the book and stepped back. The pages of the book began to flutter, then flip by themselves, and stopped on a two-page spread of the United States of America.

Bradley and the others crowded around. There were three drops of blood on the map: one in Pennsylvania, one in Florida, and the last in Arizona. Bradley grunted. “The one in Pennsylvania is Jason, probably. But why are there two others? Jason is Marla’s only sibling, and their mom died a while back. I think we would have heard if Marla had ever had a kid. I guess Jason might have fathered a child, though. He’s got ‘deadbeat dad’ written all over him.”