Read Online Haruspex (Marla Mason) by T.A. Pratt - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: T.A. Pratt
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of the ground, it remembers the early failure, and remains tethered.
Marla finished her drink and went to the archway leading to Juliana’s infamous eighth room. The uninitiated whispered speculations about the obscenities that must take place there, and all of them knew someone who knew someone who’d been inside.
In truth, the eighth room simply provided a meeting place for special figures, a protected place unobserved by the roaming, many-eyed Thrones who spied on the city’s sorcerers, gathering evidence for some future reckoning. The Thrones could be glimpsed in the most unlikely places, recognizable to the trained eye by the crackle of static electricity jumping in their hair and the light that showed from the edges of their eyes, like the sun’s corona leaking around the moon during an eclipse, but the eighth room’s properties blinded them entirely.
Nothing overtly horrific took place in that room, though the quiet discussions that went on could chill blood. When demonstrably monstrous entities, human and otherwise, plotted things so terrible they could only be discussed in secret, they met in the eighth room.
And sometimes people who didn’t want to be found paid a price to hide there. If Rondeau had paid, Juliana would have protected his privacy to the death. Rondeau hadn’t paid, though; he’d only asked a favor.
Marla pushed aside the heavy red curtain and stepped into the eighth room. A small, concrete-floored space, it barely held eight office chairs and a long conference table. Gas lamps burned on the water-spotted walls. Electricity (among other things) didn’t work properly in the eighth room.
Rondeau, seated, stared at her, clutching the chair’s arm. As always, Marla felt faintly disappointed at his appearance. His actuality never lived up to her memory. When she thought back on her past dealings with Rondeau, she remembered a man with demonic handsomeness, a debonair charm, and a cunning that surrounded him like a radioactive aura. Just one of his small magics, she knew, to make himself more impressive when people told stories about him. In the flesh he cut a nondescript figure, a dark-haired bony twenty-something, unremarkable except for his replacement jaw, stolen from a larger man and a poor match for his head, and his flamboyant blue-and-red silk suit. In films, demons are wise-cracking and suave, or sinister and taciturn, but in Marla’s experience real supernatural creatures spent most of their time simply trying to pass for human.
“Your jaw spoke to me today,” she said, not sitting down, touching the stag beetle pin at her throat. “It told me you knew the haruspex.”
“Haruspex?” His bewilderment, even veiled by fear, seemed genuine. He held his chin protectively, talking from behind his hand.
Marla considered. She’d taken Rondeau’s jaw, quite against his will, shortly after he came to earth, only a few days after he possessed a young boy’s body. If questioned properly, the jaw spoke to her. It knew whatever Rondeau did. Like subatomic particles that once collide and remain connected forever, regardless of distance, Rondeau and his jaw shared information instantaneously. Marla kept the jaw locked in a lead box so Rondeau wouldn’t be privy to details about her home life. Sometimes, the jaw knew things before Rondeau did, an oddity and occasional paradox that Marla accepted but did not understand.
“A haruspex is a sorcerer who divines the future by studying the arrangement of things,” she said. “Tea leaves, or scattered stones, sometimes -- but usually entrails.” He looked blank. “Intestines. Guts, Rondeau.”
His eyes widened. “ Him ? The belly man? That’s why he’s doing it?” He swore, an inhuman obscenity that made Marla wince. If he’d uttered it outside the eighth room’s protective walls, paint would have blistered and flies dropped dead, and Marla would have endured ringing in her ears for hours afterward. “That makes a little more
Marla finished her drink and went to the archway leading to Juliana’s infamous eighth room. The uninitiated whispered speculations about the obscenities that must take place there, and all of them knew someone who knew someone who’d been inside.
In truth, the eighth room simply provided a meeting place for special figures, a protected place unobserved by the roaming, many-eyed Thrones who spied on the city’s sorcerers, gathering evidence for some future reckoning. The Thrones could be glimpsed in the most unlikely places, recognizable to the trained eye by the crackle of static electricity jumping in their hair and the light that showed from the edges of their eyes, like the sun’s corona leaking around the moon during an eclipse, but the eighth room’s properties blinded them entirely.
Nothing overtly horrific took place in that room, though the quiet discussions that went on could chill blood. When demonstrably monstrous entities, human and otherwise, plotted things so terrible they could only be discussed in secret, they met in the eighth room.
And sometimes people who didn’t want to be found paid a price to hide there. If Rondeau had paid, Juliana would have protected his privacy to the death. Rondeau hadn’t paid, though; he’d only asked a favor.
Marla pushed aside the heavy red curtain and stepped into the eighth room. A small, concrete-floored space, it barely held eight office chairs and a long conference table. Gas lamps burned on the water-spotted walls. Electricity (among other things) didn’t work properly in the eighth room.
Rondeau, seated, stared at her, clutching the chair’s arm. As always, Marla felt faintly disappointed at his appearance. His actuality never lived up to her memory. When she thought back on her past dealings with Rondeau, she remembered a man with demonic handsomeness, a debonair charm, and a cunning that surrounded him like a radioactive aura. Just one of his small magics, she knew, to make himself more impressive when people told stories about him. In the flesh he cut a nondescript figure, a dark-haired bony twenty-something, unremarkable except for his replacement jaw, stolen from a larger man and a poor match for his head, and his flamboyant blue-and-red silk suit. In films, demons are wise-cracking and suave, or sinister and taciturn, but in Marla’s experience real supernatural creatures spent most of their time simply trying to pass for human.
“Your jaw spoke to me today,” she said, not sitting down, touching the stag beetle pin at her throat. “It told me you knew the haruspex.”
“Haruspex?” His bewilderment, even veiled by fear, seemed genuine. He held his chin protectively, talking from behind his hand.
Marla considered. She’d taken Rondeau’s jaw, quite against his will, shortly after he came to earth, only a few days after he possessed a young boy’s body. If questioned properly, the jaw spoke to her. It knew whatever Rondeau did. Like subatomic particles that once collide and remain connected forever, regardless of distance, Rondeau and his jaw shared information instantaneously. Marla kept the jaw locked in a lead box so Rondeau wouldn’t be privy to details about her home life. Sometimes, the jaw knew things before Rondeau did, an oddity and occasional paradox that Marla accepted but did not understand.
“A haruspex is a sorcerer who divines the future by studying the arrangement of things,” she said. “Tea leaves, or scattered stones, sometimes -- but usually entrails.” He looked blank. “Intestines. Guts, Rondeau.”
His eyes widened. “ Him ? The belly man? That’s why he’s doing it?” He swore, an inhuman obscenity that made Marla wince. If he’d uttered it outside the eighth room’s protective walls, paint would have blistered and flies dropped dead, and Marla would have endured ringing in her ears for hours afterward. “That makes a little more
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