Haruspex (Marla Mason) Read Online Free

questioning it right now, keeping track of her every thought, rifling through her secrets! She realized Rondeau must feel the same way, and a rush of shame suffused her.
    A new concern overwhelmed her jaw-worries. She touched the pin at her throat, surprised to find her cloak still attached. Rondeau could have taken that for himself, or sold it to the highest bidder. No one could use it as well as she, anymore than someone untrained in sword fighting could wield a katana like a master, but many would have liked the opportunity to learn.
    Marla gathered the cloak around her, bunching the soft white side in her fingers, letting its healing energies fill her. She’d lost a lot of blood, but as the cloak worked, she felt her strength return. If I’d had my purple turned, I’d have eaten him for breakfast , she thought, knowing it wasn’t true, comforted by her anger anyway.
    “You’ll be going after him,” Rondeau said. “I just want you to know, I’ll help you.”
    She nodded absently, looking at Juliana’s corpse, covered, in the corner. She felt an overwhelming urge to tear the sheet away, to look at Juliana’s body. More than an urge: A compulsion, or a mandate handed down by forces unseen.
    She crawled on hands and knees across the room and tugged the sheet aside. Juliana lay sprawled, her intestines lying beside her, a meaningless spill of gray like the alphabet disarranged.
    But only disarranged. She could read the alphabet, just not the mussed message.
    “The cameras,” she said suddenly. “We have to go upstairs, to the office, and looked at the surveillance tape.”
    “You’re the boss,” Rondeau said.
    #
    It took some doing, but Rondeau finally isolated and enlarged a clear frame showing Juliana’s corpse. “It’s a good thing I got her to invest in such high-quality equipment,” Rondeau said, clearly uncomfortable looking at Juliana’s death-image on film. “I told her, the usual protections are all well and good, but times are changing, and the eighth room, it needs all the security it can get, so we put these cameras right outside...” He prattled on. Marla ignored him, staring at the screen.
    The Belly Killer showed up indistinctly on the film, shimmering with auras that obscured him, an arm or leg occasionally appearing clearly. In the frame just after he stepped away Marla could see Juliana’s intestines undisturbed in their original, portentous configuration.
    What’s more, she could read the portents. The Thrones had given her the gift of divination, allowing her to read clues that eluded everyone else.
    She looked at the intestines, the message revealed clearly, and didn’t know what to make of it. Could the portents be wrong ? “According to this, I’m the Belly Killer’s only chance at survival. Except I know I’ve got every intention of killing him.”
    “You can really read the intestines, like a haruspex?”
    She nodded.
    “That explains why he didn’t kill you, at least. Why kill his one chance at survival? It might explain why he took your jaw, too. I’d want to keep tabs on you, if I were him.”
    Marla rubbed her chin, her sense of violation returning. The Belly Killer could find out anything she knew. Of course, he had to ask the right questions. The jaw wouldn’t offer any information, and would respond as cryptically as possible. The Belly Killer didn’t strike her as a particularly subtle questioner, either. He might not even know to question it. As a mortal madman gifted with power, his understanding of the unseen world must be sketchy at best. Still, she didn’t want him to have her jaw. It belonged to her.
    “You know,” Rondeau said, apropos of nothing, “I can still feel my jaw.” He pointed northwest, in the direction of Marla’s apartment. “I could walk straight to it, I bet.” He grinned.
    Marla stared at him, then concentrated, trying to feel... There. To the east.
    Marla grinned back at him.
    #
    The next day, after sleeping in Juliana’s