Grim Tides (Marla Mason) by T.A. Pratt Page B

Fine. I never read instruction manuals anyway. It won’t kill anyone it touches, will it? Give me that much of a heads-up.”
    “No touch of death,” he said. “I have to reserve some of my powers for myself.” He kissed Marla on the forehead – if Rondeau had ever tried doing that, Marla would have kicked his balls up through his ribcage – and then left, this time walking out the actual front door.
    Marla squinted at the ring, shrugged, and slipped it into her pocket.
    “Are you going to wear that?” Rondeau said.
    “I put on a wearable artifact once before without knowing what the hell it did,” Marla said. “And that cloak eventually dumped an ocean of shit on my head. That’s not a mistake I’m going to make again.” She shook her head. “Never get married, gentlemen. It’s a peculiar institution.”
    “So what now, Poirot?” Rondeau said. “Since the shortcuts failed us, what? We take the long way around?”
    “I guess we go investigate .” She began pacing up and down the room and talking to herself while Rondeau lounged and Pelham worked on reorganizing the bookshelves according to some arcane system of his own. “So,” she said. “Let’s look at the evidence. I haven’t made plaster casts of any footprints or taken any fingerprints, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have any clues. The murderer is someone powerful enough to deploy supernatural forensic countermeasures, to shroud their identity even from one of Rondeau’s oracles. Ronin doesn’t want to give up the killer, which maybe means it’s someone he wants to protect, for whatever reason. So what’s that tell us?”
    “You need a violin to play or some cocaine to inject or something,” Rondeau said. “Your pacing around is making me tired.”
    “It’s obviously someone in the magical community,” Pelham said, without looking away from his work. Rondeau wanted to ask if he was sorting by the Dewey Decimal or the Library of Congress system, but since he didn’t actually know what the difference was, he didn’t bother. “Any murder investigation would start with the victim’s closest associates, wouldn’t it? If a woman dies, you look at the husband. If a child dies, consider the parents.”
    “You mean he might have been killed by one of the other surfers? Huh, maybe, but I get the feeling they’re pretty closely bound-up together – it’s hard to imagine one of them could do the dirty deed without the others finding out. Still, it’s worth looking into.”
    “We could see if there are any ex -surfers, too,” Rondeau said, getting into it now. “After all, where there’s a group, there’s usually an outcast.”
    “Ha.” Marla paused for a moment, then tromped on, up and down. She was going to wear a groove in the hardwood if she made a habit out of this. “Speaking as an outcast, I can sympathize with murderous impulses. So that’s a good idea. We’ll ask our clients a few questions. Not that I can necessarily believe anything they say – for all I know they’re a cult worshipping dark sea gods and practicing human sacrifice...” She snapped her fingers. “Rondeau. Get in touch with the Bay Witch, would you? Call Hamil, he can reach her. She knows these guys, but she’s not of them anymore, so maybe she’ll have some insight.”
    “Insight? From Zufi? Maybe if her brain worked even remotely like a normal person’s...”
    “It can’t hurt to ask,” Marla said. “Come on, we’re working our contacts here, this is good. Probably worth asking some of the other magic types in the area about Ronin and the rest of the wave-mages, too – try to get an objective sense of the group.”
    “Do you know many people in the local magical community?” Pelham asked. “Is there a chief sorcerer here?”
    Marla shook her head. “I don’t know if they were ever all that hierarchical, but things are extra messy around here now – we told you about that lunatic hunting and killing other sorcerers not too long