Mommy Issues of the Dead (Marla Mason) Read Free Page A

Marla’s mom had been most tolerable during her occasional forays into 12-step programs, though she usually hit a wall right around step 4: making a searching and fearless moral inventory. Marla’s mom wasn’t much for introspection. In that respect, mother and daughter had something in common.
    Marla decided to do a fearless personal inventory of her own, though – not of her morals, but of her resources.
    In the hand not clutching the bush, she held a battered leather knapsack, which had slid off her shoulder and nearly tumbled down the hill – it seemed a lot more like a mountainside than a hillside to her, but she was from Felport by way of Indiana, so what did she know from mountains? – which would have been bad, since the bag contained various valuable things, fragile and otherwise, including:
    A pair of knives, one an antique dagger her mentor had given her, another balanced for throwing that she’d purchased herself;
    A coil of thin strong line fifty feet long, attached to a clever collapsible grappling hook;
    A pair of brass knuckles with a wicked inertial enchantment worked into the metal, perfect for face-punching;
    Spare socks;
    A rain poncho;
    A slightly-rusty Altoids tin that contained a survival kit in miniature, consisting of a small signal mirror, waterproof matches, flint and a little hacksaw blade, cotton balls, a tiny (non-magical) compass, a brass wire small animal snare, a twist of nylon fishing line with fishhooks, a bit of candle, a flashlight the size of a lipstick, a plastic bag for carrying water, and iodine tablets;
    And, of course, a cursed snow globe. Everything else would be more or less useful if she had to hide out in the woods overnight – hideous thought – but she wasn’t sure what good the snow globe could possibly do her.
    For now, if she could get the grappling hook out and snag it on the bush she was clinging to, then she could lower herself down this slope, hoping it didn’t end in a river or leg-breaking deadfall or something, and from there maybe hike to high ground, climb a tree, figure out which way the road was, hike that way, and maybe possibly get to her extraction point before –
    “She’s down there!” shouted a voice up on the ridgeline. Sounded like the uglier of the two meth-lab-monkeys.
    “So go down and get her,” Watt said, his voice weirdly high and fluting and artificial, but his annoyance and impatience still coming through loud and clear.
    Oh well , Marla thought. Let’s go, gravity . She relinquished her grip on the bush. Marla bumped and slid and rolled along, collecting a full suite of bruises. Damn I wish I had my cloak , she thought, and then she rolled over an especially big rock and went airborne.
    Marla sailed through the air, though not far, since falling human bodies are not especially aerodynamic. She landed in a mound of damp leaves at the base of the hill and sat up groaning, but nothing was broken, just generally battered. Marla tore open her knapsack, slipped on her brass knuckles, considered her knives, and finally just lifted out the snow globe. Running away hadn’t worked so well, and from the sound of things Watt and his imps were coming down the hill in a more controlled way than she had, so it was time to make some kind of stand.
    The scatterguns came sliding down the hill first, no doubt lost in transit, and Marla grinned. That was a bit of luck. She snatched one gun up and chucked the other behind her into the trees. The meth monkeys landed a moment later, covered in mud and not too happy about it, and they looked less happy when Marla pointed the gun at them, low, and fired. They both collapsed, their legs riddled with shot, howling. They’d live, but their injuries probably hurt bad enough they wished they wouldn’t.
    Marla tossed the gun away with the other one. Shooting the junkyard golem where Savery Watt’s spirit resided wouldn’t even piss him off. It’d be like tossing snowballs at the sun.
    Watt trundled down