Haruspex (Marla Mason) Read Online Free Page A

office and recovering her strength, Marla used her pet policeman to look at the crime scene photos, to see the undisturbed guts and read what the Belly Killer had. She ran her policeman deftly, like a professional driver in a high performance machine.
    After a long morning poring over photos with her pet’s eyes, Marla sat back in Juliana’s (but Rondeau’s, now, she remembered) office chair, rubbing her eyes. She was both disappointed and relieved by what she’d seen.
    “So what does the future hold?” Rondeau asked, straining for casualness. “Cataclysm? Alien invasion? Are hemlines dropping this spring?”
    Marla shook her head, her own hopes for a grand revelation already gone. The killer was interested in the merely personal, as the Thrones said. “The Belly Killer doesn’t care about that. His divinations have one purpose: To find out the details of his own death.”
    Rondeau gaped. “That’s it? He killed Sorenson and Mann and Chandler to find out how he’s going to die?
    “What else matters?” Marla asked.
    #
    Marla flew over the city, her cloak fluttering white, angel wings in moonlight. The Belly Killer read the future, and those readings spelled out a multitude of possible deaths. He’d seen futures where he died at Sorenson’s hands, Chandler’s, Mann’s, all his victims’, and still more who hadn’t been killed yet, who the Belly Killer would surely target soon. Artie Mann’s entrails named Juliana as a threat, and so the Belly Killer took steps to remove her. Marla couldn’t imagine Juliana hurting anyone -- unless they tried to get into the eighth room without her leave. As custodian, even someone as dissolute as Juliana couldn’t stand for that. If, at some future time, the Belly Killer tried to enter the eighth room, Juliana might have mustered enough last-ditch power to stop him. That situation would never come up, now.
    The Belly Killer did what no ancient priestly haruspex ever had. He attempted to change the future, eliminating risks and reading the new future in the guts of the old.
    The sorcerers all wanted him dead now, because he’d been killing their kind. If he’d never murdered in the first place, would anyone want to kill him, would his future hold such executions? Had the killer caught himself in a snare of recursive causality? Certainly Marla wouldn’t be after him if he hadn’t killed Artie.
    As an agent of the Thrones, though, he would have frightened or angered the sorcerers, probably sooner than later. Attempts on his life were assured from the moment the Thrones chose him. He never had a chance.
    The Belly Killer could die, the futures agreed on that. He could, he would, he didn’t want to -- and according to Juliana’s unwilling prophecy, only Marla could save him.
    She didn’t plan to do so. She would treat him like a rabid dog, killing him without magic, from a distance. She hoped his prodigious powers of self-defense wouldn’t activate, that she could blow his head apart before lightning sheathed him and the air filled with the stink of ozone and curdled blood.
    She flew over the city, a sniper rifle clutched to her chest, homing in on her missing piece, her torn-off jaw broadcasting like a communications tower engaged in the transmission of pain.
    #
    She found the killer in the parking lot of a long-closed supermarket. Newspaper covered the building’s windows and half the letters in the store’s sign were missing. A single shopping cart lay upside-down in the center of the yellow-lined parking lot like the skeleton of an exotic dinosaur. A scrap of paper fluttered forlornly along the asphalt. The big mercury lights didn’t work, as defunct as the store itself, but Marla’s eyes could do wonders with the moon and starlight.
    She settled, invisible, on the arm of a lightpole, sitting easily as an owl on a branch. The Belly Killer stood in the center of the lot, hands at his sides, Marla’s bloody jaw tucked carelessly into his back pocket like a