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

monsters, she was more qualified, anyway.
    He nodded at Crapsey. “What do we do with him?”
    “Can you suck his mind dry, and find out everything he knows?”
    Bradley frowned. “I mean, in theory, I guess. But I’d rather not. Messing around with people’s minds is dangerous. I could turn him into a drooling cucumber.”
    “It might be an improvement.” She sighed. “All right, let’s get him tied up in the RV. I’m going to take a shower. You can start driving... wherever we’re going. Have you tracked this creature at all?”
    “Oh, yeah. It’s hovering around in Santa Cruz. There’s, well... some weird stuff there. A spot where reality is malleable. Either the Outsider is just drawn to that spot mindlessly, moth-to-flame style, or else it’s plotting something. Assuming it has anything we would comprehend as thought processes or motivations, which is a big assumption.”
    “‘The Outsider’? You’ve been chasing it long enough to name it, huh.”
    “Gotta call it something, and ‘Rover’ didn’t seem to fit.”
    “Hmm. Santa Cruz. All right. How long to drive there?”
    “Like eight hours?” Marla wouldn’t want to do any of the driving, he knew. Driving was something apprentices did, and even though, as the representative of a meta-god, he should outrank her, even taking into account her status as a part-time death god, there was no way he was anything more than an apprentice in her company.
    She cracked her knuckles. “Good. That allows time for me and Crapsey to have a chat.”
    “So... you don’t want to go after Pelham and Rondeau?”
    “Priorities, Bradley. Extradimensional creatures are dangerous, and this one is extra-dangerous – it must be, or you wouldn’t be here. I know you – or your higher self – doesn’t much care about the fate of any particular branch of the multiverse. There are zillions of them, and some of them are pretty horrible places, worlds where human life was extinguished long ago, or never existed in the first place. Worlds run by evil gods, robot spiders, skin-eating mutants, guys with goatees, who knows what. That means this thing, this Outsider, is a threat to the integrity of the multiverse itself, to all realities, so the stakes are pretty high, right?”
    Bradley nodded.
    “Pelham and Rondeau are capable. Good at getting into trouble, especially Rondeau, but also good at getting out of trouble, especially Pelham. So we’ll go to Santa Cruz, take care of this Outsider thing, and then, if they still need rescuing, I’ll get on that. When it comes to triage, ‘reality-destroying monster’ trumps ‘friends in the clutches of an incompetent severed head with delusions of grandeur.’ Even if she has popped her head on top of a mannequin or golem or med-school cadaver or something.”
    “Can’t argue with your logic,” Bradley said. He cleared his throat. “There’s just... one thing. You’re right that the Outsider is a threat. It’s such a big threat that this branch of the multiverse has been quarantined. Not cut off, just sort of... frozen. It’s not branching anymore.”
    Marla frowned, then nodded. “I get it. Keep it locked down, so there aren’t lots of alternate versions of the monster running loose. So if we get rid of the Outsider here, he’s gone everywhere, and we get welcomed back into the multiversal fold? The tourniquet comes off?”
    “Right.”
    “And if we fail... what? Amputation? Like somebody who gets a zombie bite on their arm, and you chop off the arm to save the body?”
    She was looking at him so intently, he tried not to squirm. “Basically, yeah. But there’s kind of a ticking clock, too. It takes a lot of effort to keep this reality from proliferating and branching. I’m – the rest of me – is keeping it locked down, but it’s like stopping a volcano from erupting by sticking your thumb in the caldera. The pressure’s going to build, and when it gets to be too much, we’ll have no choice but to cut