Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) by T.A. Pratt

close to being your B,” he said. “I’m from a branch of the multiverse just half a degree distant. Your Bradley arrived at the scene of a crime in time to get himself killed. Me, I was a little late, so by the time I got there, everything was over.”
    “Rondeau didn’t take over your body, then?” she said. “I mean, demonstrably. So, what happened in your branch?”
    “Remember that guy Danny Two Saints, the thug? Rondeau took over his body instead. Nobody much mourned his loss, I must say. I stayed on as your apprentice for a while in that world. Admittedly, from that point on, my timeline and yours diverged... a lot. Where I come from, you’re still chief sorcerer of Felport.”
    She grunted. “Sure. I didn’t ruin everything by trying to bring you back to life over there.”
    He nodded. “I appreciate the effort, though. We all do. Anyway, when Bradley Bowman became the new overseer of the multiverse, I got uplifted along with all the other versions of us from throughout all the branches, consolidated into a single consciousness...”
    “So what are you now , standing before me? Like, a pseudopod? The Over-Bradley sticking his pinky finger into my reality?”
    He shook his head. “I’m more like an autonomous vehicle. A single instance of Bradley, cut loose and sent here on a mission. The reason I’m here –”
    Marla cut him off. “I bet I know. The thing my cultists found in the caverns, it’s from elsewhere , yeah? Something from another, inimical universe? Like my old cloak?”
    Bradley shivered at the mention of her cloak, which had seemed like a powerful magical artifact, but had actually been an intelligent parasitic entity from a place with entirely different physical laws. The cloak had caused him trouble, even after he was elevated to his position as overseer of the multiverse. “Like that, but not identical. As far as I can tell, this new creature, this Outsider, doesn’t need a host to survive in this universe, but it doesn’t have much of a body, either – it’s almost ethereal, looks like a creature made of shadow. Probably once upon a time it had a more concrete form, but the centuries or millennia it spent imprisoned took a toll. It’s traveling around now, consuming humans as it goes, and its ontological mass – it’s reality – is increasing with each kill. I think it’s building itself a body that can function in this universe. Maybe learning about us by devouring us. Maybe taking memories or other properties from its victims. Who knows? I’m just here to kill it, and since you’ve always been infinitely better at killing things than I am, I figured I’d ask for help.”
    “Also because it’s my fault the thing got loose.” She sighed. “I was trying to keep the cultists out of trouble, because a bunch of unsupervised zealots devoted to a goddess of death is a recipe for trouble. I sent them into the caverns to explore, thinking they wouldn’t find anything, that it was a snipe hunt, but the poor idiots found an actual snipe. That thing that got loose is my responsibility. I’ll take care of it. But I’m happy to have one of the Over-Bradley’s fingernail clippings to help out.”
    Bradley, fortunately, had been under no illusions about how this was going to work. Just because he was an emissary from an entity elevated as far above the gods as the gods were above humans, just because he was a psychic capable of summoning oracles to answer nearly any question, just because he was well-versed in the dangers of incursions from other universes, didn’t mean he was going to be in charge. So what if Marla was currently penniless, without unkidnapped allies, and cut off from the powers she possessed as a god of death during her mortal month on Earth? She was still Marla Mason, and that meant she was going to take the lead.
    Bradley was fine with that. He had enough responsibility in his life. Let it rest on someone else’s shoulders for now. When it came to killing