Bride of Death (Marla Mason) (33 page)

Pelly drove the RV and I rode shotgun, with Rondeau snoozing and boozing in the back. Squat and Nicolette didn’t know about my goddess-related condition so we didn’t bring them with us, leaving them back in Vegas. As far as they knew, I was just “going away for a few weeks” to deal with some personal business.

Rondeau had promised to hook Squat up with some of the local sorcerers who might be in need of muscle and get him back on his feet, but hadn’t decided what to do with Nicolette during my absence. He was leaning toward locking her in a soundproof safe for a month, but I told him that was cruel – soundproof closet with a TV to watch was more humane. Either way, she wasn’t going to be my problem for a month. Halle-fuckin-lujah.

We pulled in to the camp, hidden in the cave where I’d come crawling out of the dirt a month ago. The cultists had made the cave their own, and when I walked inside I winced. The cave was lit with camping lanterns, mainly, but there were a couple of burned-out torches jammed into cracks in the wall too. They’d carved niches in the walls, and filled them with the skulls of various animals. “What the hell, Pelly?”

He sighed. “There’s a website that sells both genuine and replica animal skulls. They insisted on purchasing these, saying they gave the room the proper ‘ambiance.”’

“At least there aren’t stuffed ravens and fake spiderwebs everywhere.”

“I’ll see if I can find the cultists,” Pelly said. “They might be off exploring. They have come back with some disturbing reports of odd artifacts in the deep caves, but the examples they’ve brought me just look like twisted bits of stone, rendered magical by the power of wishful thinking and nothing more. They claim there are strange carvings in the walls, too, but...” He shrugged. “Your cultists are a very imaginative lot, Mrs. Mason.”

“Lucky me.” I wandered around their living quarters while Pelly went in search of my followers. They had a makeshift kitchen of the camp-stove and canned-beans variety – the farts in here must be monstrous, I thought, and felt bad about thinking it later – and they had sleeping bags and camping pads all heaped together in one room. At least my cultists were a friendly and cozy bunch. They certainly weren’t emulating their goddess in that respect.

Pelly said my worshipers were happy enough here, fulfilled and content to be serving their goddess. I felt so weird about that. The Eater’s devotees had been happy too, maybe, or at least thought they were. Sure, I wasn’t compelling anyone, not intentionally, but maybe there was some kind of goddess-aura I put out – certainly
something
drew those people to me, and maybe it was no more their “choice” to serve me, in any meaningful sense, than it was the choice of those who served the Eater. But since they did choose to serve, maybe I could help them out a bit. Buy them a couple of couches, or even just cast a keep-away spell around their camp so they wouldn’t get rousted by park rangers, which was, otherwise, an inevitability. Make some gesture, beyond this dumb ritual of letting them bury me in a hole, to show that I appreciated them. Even though I really didn’t. Faking it is part of doing better, right?

Turns out it was all pretty moot, because they were dead. I was yelling at Rondeau for eating the cultist’s marshmallows and graham crackers when Pelham reappeared, face pale. “Mrs. Mason, you... You should come and see this.”

“Fuck. What? I’m really not in the market for surprises.”

“I think the cultists must have found something in the caves beneath the valley after all,” Pelham said. “Or, at least, something found
them
.”

Turns out they’d found an entrance to the rumored cave complex below Death Valley, accessible from my own cavern. They’d widened what must have been a fairly small hole into a shaft big enough to descend, and lowered a twelve-foot metal ladder down there. I slid down the ladder after Pelly – Rondeau stayed upstairs – and followed a claustrophobic corridor, lit periodically with clusters of low-energy LEDs that would burn for ages before the batteries ran out. The passageway meandered for a hundred yards or so before opening out into a conference-room-sized cavern lit by big industrial Klieg lights. Various tunnels led away from the space at random intervals, and there was a whiteboard propped against one wall with a hand-drawn map, presumably of the cave system, in blue and red marker, scribbled with incomprehensible notations. A wooden table held a heap of broken bits of stone, which might have passed for hand-carved idols of some kind if you had the right kind of fevered imagination and had read too much Lovecraft lately. But I didn’t notice any of that right away.

I noticed the blood, and I noticed the hole.

There were no bodies, no meat, no bones, but there were plenty of blood-soaked rags of robes and streaks of blood. Not puddles, but smears, as if a great tongue had licked up as much of the human spillage as possible before taking off. A few twinkling objects were scattered amid the blood. I knelt and looked them over, feeling cold inside. “This is a gold tooth,” I said. “And here are several fillings, and that’s a titanium screw – a surgical screw.”

“There is a glass eye, here, Mrs. Mason,” Pelly said. “One of the cultists, a Tara Yoshikawa of Dearborn Michigan, had it in her head when last I saw her. And here there is a pacemaker. Mrs. Carroway of Stowe Vermont had one of those. And, ah...” He flushed, and I glanced over, and winced. It looked like a little letter “T” – somebody’s IUD.

“Something
ate
these people,” I said. “Their bones, their organs, their skin, their hair...”

“But it spat out all foreign objects, it seems.”

“That’s even creepier than just devouring someone whole. What the hell could have done this?”

“Whatever it was, it seems to have departed.”

We both looked at the hole, then. It was about ten feet across, punched straight through the rock ceiling above us, and at the top, there was a glimmer of blue sky. Whatever had killed the cultists had bored or burned or dissolved or simply punched right through several yards of earth and stone, and now it was out there in the world somewhere.

I’d killed one Eater, and inadvertently unleashed another, more literal Eater, it seemed.

“Perhaps we should investigate the tunnels, Mrs. Mason,” he said. “And search for survivors.”

“Perhaps we should get up above ground and
track
this thing –”

“You don’t have time, Mrs. Mason,” he said gently. “Your allotted period of mortality is almost up. In just a few hours, you must return to your throne.”

“Maybe I could get Death to give me an extension, or...” I trailed off. Death and I had made a bargain, but it wasn’t like a handshake agreement – more like a geas. Or a natural law. You can’t negotiate the timing of the coming of winter. Our agreement was binding in all kinds of ways, and Death couldn’t have changed it even if he’d wanted to.

Pelham consulted the map – it made more sense to him than it did to me – and then we set off into one of the tunnels, armed with flashlights the cultists had left behind. This tunnel was smaller, tighter, and a pain in the ass to squeeze through, and Pelham said the cultists had probably avoided it until recently in favor of checking out simpler routes. Eventually we reached a round, low-ceilinged room, with a deep black hole in the center, about ten feet across. Our flashlights couldn’t begin to penetrate those depths. There were cracked bits of stone around the hole, as if there’d been a lid or cap on top of it, and something had shattered the seal. Pelham and I took that in grimly and without comment.

The walls were indeed decorated with crude images, of twisting serpents and stylized whorls that might have been wind or waves, and human figures.

“What’s that next to the people?” Pelham said. “A bush?”

I squinted, shining my flashlight, then whistled. “No. I think that’s a tree.”

“But, if that’s drawn to scale...”

“Then the person is taller than the tree,” I said. “Damn it. There really
were
giants in the earth, hidden away in caves under Death Valley? What the hell? That’s like sending someone on a snipe hunt and they come back with the body of a dead snipe.”

“These giants are considerably taller than nine feet,” he said. “If this drawing is to be believed, at least.”

“Could be very small trees. So you think the cultists found a giant and woke it up, somehow?”

“It is a hypothesis,” he said. “Or perhaps the lost race of giants imprisoned something here, long ago, and
that
is what the cultists released.”

I thought of the Beast of Sunlight Shores. Whatever had killed the cultists –
my
cultists – was even more vicious than that creature had been, and may have been trapped under a similar seal. I hate coincidences. I’ve been around too many gods in my life to entirely believe in random chance.

“When did you last hear from the cultists?” I asked.

“They have a satellite phone, and their leader Ambrose called me just yesterday, to tell me they’d found something remarkable – but that was a claim I’d heard before, only to be confronted with a fist-sized piece of misshapen rock, or something that might have been the blade of a flint knife. Perhaps I should have taken them more seriously.”

“It’s not your fault, Pelly. None of us took it seriously, because we didn’t think it was serious. But now... you have to move on this thing. Get Rondeau to help you – he can consult oracles – and make Nicolette help, too, tell her if she doesn’t cooperate I’ll make her life miserable when I get back in town.
Find
this thing, whatever it is. My hope is that it only ate all the cultists because it had been trapped for who knows how long, and it was starving. If we’re lucky, it won’t need to feed again for a while, and it’s just curled up somewhere in the valley. At least we’re not in the middle of Manhattan or something.”

“And if we can track this creature?”

I chewed my lip. “There aren’t a lot of people left who owe me favors, huh? Perren River, on the council of sorcerers in Felport, was always fond of me, and still has gang connections with the Honeyed Knots, if we need muscle or trackers. I already owe the Bay Witch a favor, but she’s unpredictable, and she might help out if we asked sweetly. Try to track down whatever assistance you can, but in a pinch, send in Squat to fight the thing. He’s immortal, at least. If all else fails, hold the line and wait for me, and when I get back...” I shrugged. “I’ll do what I can. This thing getting loose is my fuck-up, and I should be the one to fix it.”

It was hard not to notice that the death toll among my cultists was
way
higher than that among the Eater’s cultists. In the Eater’s fucked-up way, he took care of his people.

I really need to do better.

I will remember the ones who fell in my service. I didn’t honor them in life, but I can honor their memories. And when the time comes, if I can, I will avenge them.

Here I am, in the room where I rose from the dead one month ago today. A few days ago I thought I’d done pretty good, but now, once again, I have to face the fact that I’ve cost people their lives by being thoughtless. Not so long ago I would have refused all responsibility – I didn’t
ask
these people to worship me, they chose that for themselves, it’s no business of mine if they got themselves killed – but I can admit my own part in it now. Their deaths are not wholly my responsibility, no, but I could have prevented them, if I’d taken a little more care.

I don’t have much longer, maybe just a few minutes, and –

Well, hell. There’s the door, appearing out of nowhere, but looking like it’s been there forever. Swinging open now.

And death is a door that, when it opens, you have no choice but to walk through.

FROM THE DESK OF NICOLETTE

(Pelham and Rondeau, you boot-licking fuckwits, if you find this, make sure Marla gets it when she drags herself out of the dirt next month.)

Dear Marla,

Forgive my handwriting, ha, but it’s not actually
mine
, obviously. I’ve compelled one of the maids in this shitty Vegas hotel to take dictation. I lured her in with magic – tickled her brain with the idea that there was a kid crying in here, scared and alone, she’s the compassionate kind – and once she got here, I snared her with a charm. She’s only mine for half an hour, but that’s plenty of time.

So, you’re a death goddess, huh? Yeah, I know. You thought you could keep it a secret from me? You’re so stupid. How do you literally become a god and still be
so stupid
? I may be just a head, but my hearing’s fine, and you let a few things slip, and more importantly, Tweedle-Rondeau and Pelham-Dum are crap at keeping secrets. They think because they put me on a shelf in a closet that I lost the ability to
listen
. Plus there was the fact that you should have died all those times and didn’t and, oh, yeah, the fact that you somehow kept me alive even though
I’m just a head
. It all kind of added up, and then I got confirmation.

Oh, and hey, I’m real proud of you. My nemesis is a goddess? They say you can judge a person by the quality of their enemies, and you are one primo enemy, so that just elevates me even higher.