Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (32 page)

I took a step back, but it was too late, because they started hacking away at themselves, too, one of them even shoving the blade in point-first and wiggling it around, a meditative expression on his face. “No!” I shouted, and reached out with the wand in my hand –

And withdrew death from them. From
all
of them. The kept stabbing and sawing, but the blood didn’t flow anymore, and their wounds began closing as soon as they opened. Withdrawing death, and letting life flow – I was showing them the kinder side of my true nature. I grinned, and my teeth felt strange, pointed, and my tongue did, too. They began to drop the knives, some of them sobbing, some howling, all baffled and confused, kids let down by their parent – and Squat just stood there, gaping at me, and said, “Your
eyes
...”

They couldn’t be hurt, for the moment, any of them, so I gestured with the wand, and the earth beneath them erupted in two diverging waves, sweeping half of them off to the left, half off to the right, and leaving a path of churned soil and shattered asphalt two yards wide stretching out directly in front of me. Parting the human sea.

I walked – slow and stately as a bride down the aisle – toward the center of town, gesturing here and there as I went. I pointed at his church – it was empty of life, I could sense, not so much as a mouse – and it collapsed in on itself, dropping into a sinkhole of my own invention. I pointed the wand at the stoplight and it exploded, gestured at the closed bank and watched it implode like a giant had squeezed the building in its fist.

Making the Eater tremble in fear probably wouldn’t occur to my goddess-self, but I was human, and petty, and I wanted revenge. I wanted him to know I was coming.

When I walked through the park, the grass blackened, and new green shoots rose up in their place, budding into snow-pale flowers. My motorcycle, still parked on the street where I’d left it, roared into life, motor revving as if cheering me on. I considered riding it up the steps and inside the building and right over the Eater, but there’s such a thing as being
too
theatrical.

The doors of city hall – the House of the Eater, rather – were closed, locked, and warded by considerable magics. I lifted my foot and kicked the doors off their hinges.

I couldn’t see through walls, precisely, but I could apprehend the whole of the place, and I knew the Eater in the main room where I’d been chained, at the end of this rather boring hall. There was other life, too. Half a dozen of the crab-squid-octopus guys, like the one I’d killed in the motel, none of them bothering with disguises this time. A couple of shapeshifters, growling and beginning to transform into part-wolverines or whatever. A man with his eyes and lips sewn shut, his body surrounded by swarms of biting flies, their aura of life force intermingled with his own. The Eater’s heavy hitters, his unstoppable honor guard, the last resort in case someone with a mind of their own wandered in with a shotgun and mayhem in mind.

I just waved my wand and they all burned, bright as magnesium, winking out in an instant, leaving only a thin dusting of ash behind.

I continued down the corridor, dragging the end of my wand along the wall like a kid running a stick along a picket fence, leaving a line of dry rot and charred wood.

The doors to the main hall flew open when I approached, and the Eater waited inside, dressed in the same brown robes, looking not quite as young as he had after his dramatic transformation, but not quite as ancient and withered as he had when he first lowered his hood.

“Let them all go, and I’ll let you live out what’s left of your natural span,” I said, surprised at myself for offering mercy.

“What
are
you?” he demanded. He held the moon-colored axe in one hand, but his grip was trembling.

“Yeah, what the fuck are you?” Nicolette called, and I realized she was there, too, her head resting on the throne. “I’ve been telling Emperor Palpatine here all kinds of tricks for killing you, but the magic coming off you is
insane
right now, I can’t even tell what the hell I’m looking at.”

“Hell is pretty close,” I said. “What’ll it be, Eater?”

“His real name is Garcia,” Nicolette said. “He was actually Monseigneur Garcia, for a while, weirdly enough. Interesting guy.”

“Shut up, Nicolette. I came to save you, you know.”

“Who needs saving? At least this guy put me down on a nice throne. I’m not even in a cage.”

“
Silence
!” the Eater shouted.

“Wow,” Nicolette said after a moment’s silence. “Guess he’s not used to people talking amongst themselves in this town. Or maybe he’s just a sexist asshole who doesn’t want to see two women talking to each other about anything, even a man.”

“I definitely don’t get a progressive vibe off him,” I said.

“Eh, fuck him, then,” Nicolette said. “Take him out.”

Chaos witches are so fickle. “Last chance,” I said. “Free your people, Eater.”

He licked his lips. “If I release their futures, give up the source of my power, they will be lost, confused – some of them have been here for years. Some have been here since they were babies, they don’t know any other life –”

“They’ll learn. So will you. I know a nice hospital for sorcerers who get out of control, and need to be locked up for their own protection. You can rest there, for however long you’ve got left.”

He lowered his head for a moment, and when he lifted it again, I knew he wasn’t going to be reasonable.

“Suicide by goddess,” I muttered.

The Eater raised the axe and launched himself at me.

That axe is a powerful artifact. Somehow I knew, maybe through one of the cracks in the vault of my mind, that it had once belonged to a moon goddess – no doubt she’ll come calling for it someday, when she notices it’s gone – but it couldn’t hurt me. In the hands of another god? Absolutely. Then we’d have been on equal footing, just like a couple of humans hacking away at each other. But despite the power filling the Eater from all those futures he’d devoured, he was sure as hell no god.

I twitched the wand, and his magical protections – layers and layers of armor, built up over years of rituals – flashed away like water turning to steam. Another twitch, and his flesh turned bluish-gray, every bit of fluid in his body transformed to ice. He went still, tottered, and then fell over, shattering like a rose dipped in liquid nitrogen and struck with a hammer.

“That’s going to be nasty when it thaws,” Nicolette said. “Where the hell did you get that wand? What kind of magic is that?”

“I called in a big favor.” I started to put the wand away... but it dissolved in my hand, turning into smoke that smelled faintly of night-scented jasmine. Somewhere I heard the small
click
of a partially-opened door closing deep in my mind.

I was human again, and I suddenly felt every ache I hadn’t noticed in the prior hours. I walked over to Nicolette’s throne and looked down at her. “I’ll pick you up, if you promise not to bite.”

“Bite my
ass
,” she said, and really, there was no sensible response to that, so I tucked her under my arm and went to look for my stuff.

BRIDE OF SOCIAL WORK

Oh, how I wanted to get on my motorcycle and ride off into the sunset, leaving people to say, “Who was that mysterious woman who saved us all?”

But I couldn’t, because I am Doing Better, and there were several hundred profoundly confused and traumatized people in the wreckage of a town, and they all needed help. It wasn’t like they’d lost their memories, either – they knew exactly what they’d done, they just couldn’t figure out why on Earth it had seemed like the
right
thing to do. So I had to quit being an avenging angel and start being a social worker.

That first night was rough. Squat is not a comforting presence, and Nicolette is Nicolette, so it mostly fell to me. It was tempting to call the local cops and let them deal with everything, but I’d exploded these people’s lives, so they were my responsibility. (Sure, I’d given them their lives back, but that upside to their situation tended to get lost in the hysteria.) I am obviously not a people person, but I
did
run a city for years, so it’s not like I’m incapable of managing things like this.

I got everyone gathered together in the central park and announced that the Master had died in an accident that could be deemed either tragic or fortuitous. I told them they’d been under the influence of psychotropic drugs and brainwashing – which also served to explain their “hallucinations” about me taking bullets without falling and ripping up the earth and them stabbing themselves in the neck and so on. Not all of them bought my story, but people want to believe
some
kind of narrative that makes sense, and I offered them one.

I explained that I’d come to Moros to rescue my friend Squat, and that I didn’t want to call the police because I’d broken laws along the way, and because many of the cultists had been accessories to crimes during their time with the Master. I just wanted to get them all on their way back to whatever lives they’d had before. We ended up having a sort of giant campout-slash-cookout in the park. It was actually pleasant, for a party where all the guests had PTSD.

Pelly and Rondeau arrived in the RV the following morning. They brought Riegel the dune-buggy-riding psychic with him, and he and Rondeau helped do some direct-to-mind counseling for some of the more messed-up victims of the Eater’s attentions. Some memories were discreetly wiped when necessary, and Pelly handled contacting family members, especially for the minors who’d been kidnapped.

Squat helped when he could, but people naturally found him offputting, even when he was disguised, because of the curse – and because he reminded them, if only subconsciously, of the half-remembered monsters the cultists had seen attending and assisting the Eater. Squat seemed pretty shaken up by the whole experience, too – being mind-slaved, twisting my head around backwards, all that. I guess when your life is already fucked-up with a curse, having your sense of agency entirely removed, too, must be horrifying. Talk about a loss of control. Squat started spending most of his time with Nicolette in the remains of the House of the Eater, the one place the lapsed Eat-arians could be counted on to avoid totally, and so the safest place for a talking head and a repulsive monster-man to hang without fear of freaking out the normals.

I took some comfort in the fact that Squat’s presence, by definition, must be making Nicolette miserable, but I felt bad that she was the only one Squat could really hang out with. I could handle his company okay – I hate most people anyway, so the fact that I find his presence profoundly offputting is no barrier to our friendship – but I was just too busy dealing with the human consequences of my rampage.

It took about two weeks to get everyone squared away, back to their families when possible, or sent away with some cash (courtesy of Rondeau) to help them start new lives. I wasn’t too optimistic about the long-term prospects for some of those people, but we’d repaired the psychic damage when we could, and when the last of the Eater’s people left with a bus ticket in her hand and a money belt around her waist and a set of plausible invented memories in her head, I felt a great weight lift from me.

I went into the RV and tried to sleep, and when I couldn’t, I wrote about what happened. And here I am. I think, now that I’ve written it down, I’ll be able to rest. That’s worked before. I seem to have created a ritual for myself, with this pen, this page, these outpouring thoughts. This is like confession, maybe, if only confession to myself. Well, whatever. Rituals are worthwhile as long as they work. It doesn’t matter why they work, not to me. I’m a pragmatist.

There are just a few days left until I return to the underworld. I suppose it’s possible I could do some more good in that time... but I’m only human. For the rest of the week, anyway. I’m tired. We’re going back to Vegas. I’m going to sleep a lot and eat steak and play checkers with Pelly and shoot the breeze with Rondeau and stick Nicolette in a closet and see if there’s enough money in the world to get Squat laid. Then I can go back to my other job feeling somewhat refreshed, and ready to look at the big picture again.

For my first time walking the Earth and Doing Good (or at least Better), I’ll admit there’s room for improvement, but I think I Did Okay.

VALLEY OF DEATH

Fuck. I didn’t expect to be writing here again. Didn’t that last bit of diary end on a nice triumphant rah-rah-rah note?

All good things must come to an end, and things have gone to crap in an alarming fashion, and I’m going to be leaving the world in less than an hour so I don’t have time to do a damn thing about it. I’m writing about it here instead, because I do have time for that, and maybe it’ll help me get my mind right to take up arms again when I return to life in a month’s time.

I’m not going to lie. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the cult of the Bride of Death. They were probably all profoundly broken people – the truly well-adjusted don’t dedicate themselves to death goddesses – and I probably should have tried to do something to help them, but I was focused more on problems I could fix with violence when I first woke up from my dirt nap in Death Valley. So instead of hiring a psychic to soothe their messed-up brains, or even giving them a mission to go forth and do some good in the world, I’d sent them on the equivalent of a snipe hunt, or on a run to the hardware store to buy a left-handed screwdriver. Busywork for fanatics.

At least, that’s what I’d intended when I told them to look for the remnants of an ancient imaginary civilization in the caves below Death Valley. But it turned out it was more like I’d sent them to go play in traffic.

We returned to Death Valley this morning, in preparation for apotheosis. I was willing to go to bed in Vegas and just vanish from sight, but one way Pelham had kept the cultists from chasing me all over the Southwest was by promising them there’d be a ritual farewell for me. I gathered they were going to put me in a hole in the ground and cover it with a stone and then remove the stone to show that I had vanished from sight – no uncomfortable symbolism
there
.