Free Mommy Issues of the Dead (Marla Mason) by T.A. Pratt Page A

Marla thought it was weird he found the outside world scary, since most of the outside world would be scared of him – “and he plans to kill my messenger, claim she never arrived, and keep the engine and the snow globe for himself.”
    “Snow globe? You’re sending me to bomb a guy and steal his snow globe?”
    “It’s a very special snow globe. Nothing you’d want – it’s more cursed than magical. But it has a great deal of sentimental value for me.” Viscarro said that entirely straight-faced. He was about as sentimental as a liver fluke, but as long as he paid her, what did she care? As far as selling her services went, she drew the line at murder, but if Watt was a lich, it wasn’t murder, anyway – it was monster-killing.
    “How do you know he’s planning to screw you over?”
    Viscarro frowned. “Because I’ve known him a long time, and we are much alike, and it’s what I would do, if our positions were reversed.”
    “Okay. The price is right. I’m up for it. Where am I going?” Her mercenary gigs had taken her to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago so far, and she hoped this one was somewhere closer, Boston or Pittsburgh, so she wouldn’t have to spend much time out of Felport. She hated traveling. This city was her home.
    “Just outside a wide place in the road called Sweetwater, in the North Carolina mountains. Beautiful, especially in autumn. The colors of the leaves, you know. I haven’t been there in a long time, but I can remember.”
    “What’s a sorcerer doing there? Aren’t the southern Appalachians all...” She waved her hands vaguely. “I don’t know. Black bears and straw hats and moonshine and inbreeding?”
    “Provincial little bigot,” Viscarro said. “I was born in the South. I remember Lexington-style barbecue quite fondly, though no one makes it right up here. And, no, Mr. Watt does not make moonshine.” Viscarro paused. “He makes methamphetamine these days, mostly.”
    “Oh, that’s reassuring.”
    Viscarro finished tinkering with the engine and passed it over. “One other thing. You can’t take your cloak with you on this trip.”
    Marla touched the silver stag beetle pin that held her white-and-purple cloak around her shoulders. “What are you, my mother? Why should you get a say in my fashion decisions?”
    Viscarro bared his teeth. “That cloak isn’t an item of fashion, it’s a weapon .”
    “Okay, fine – then why should I let you dictate which weapons I bring with me?” Marla was not a big fan of stipulations and limitations. Her life wasn’t a sonnet; it didn’t benefit from the rigors of a restrictive form. She liked having lots of options on a mission, and the cloak she’d found hanging in a thrift store on her twentieth birthday was her ultimate option: while wearing it, any wounds she received healed rapidly, and if she needed to, she could unleash the cloak’s destructive powers, and become a one-woman massacre.
    Viscarro shook his head. “The cloak reeks of magic. I want Watt to think you’re merely a messenger. If he sees you arrive in that thing, he’ll know you’re a true operative. Besides, I want to see how you handle a situation without that advantage. A lot of people say you’re a talentless little hack, you know, who just lucked into finding a potent magical weapon. Sometimes when people want to hire you, they don’t say, ‘I should hire Marla,’ they say, ‘I should hire the girl with the cloak.’ How does that make you feel?”
    She snorted. “Feelings are stupid. But I don’t need the cloak. I can bust heads just fine on my own.” And maybe she was too dependent on her artifact. She didn’t like the way using the cloak made her feel, anyway – it was much older than her, and quite possibly smarter, and absolutely more malevolent, and sometimes when she was wearing it, she felt almost like the cloak was wearing her instead.
    “If you’d like to leave it with me, in, ah, storage –” Viscarro