Free Shark's Teeth (Marla Mason) by T.A. Pratt

SHARK’S TEETH
    T.A. PRATT
    Marla Mason, sorcerer in exile, looked over the railing of the balcony, down at the lavish resort hotel’s pool with its swim-up bar and tanned, happy people lounging on chairs, and thought, I can’t take another day of this .
    ‘‘I can’t take another day of this,’’ she said aloud to her companion, Rondeau, who leaned on the rail popping macadamia nuts into his mouth from a tin. He wore the most outrageous aloha shirt Marla had ever seen – its eye-wrenching pattern included not only parrots and palm trees but also sailboats and sunsets and what appeared to be carnivorous plants – and had the self-satisfied look of someone with more money in the bank than he could spend in even a fairly dissolute lifetime.
    ‘‘Come on,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s a beautiful day. Enjoy it.’’
    ‘‘We’re on Maui. In a resort, no less. Of course it’s a beautiful day. So was yesterday. I’ll lay even money tomorrow will be, too. I’m bored. I hate being bored.’’
    He shrugged. ‘‘So go look for a fight. Break a taboo and see if you can piss off a local god. The exercise would do you good.’’
    She snorted. ‘‘I think I’d rather do something useful. I know you embrace your uselessness –’’
    ‘‘Hey, I support the local economy. The massage industry alone is having a great year because of me.’’
    ‘‘– but I like doing things,’’ she finished, ignoring him.
    ‘‘I’m telling you: occult private eye. That’s your new gig. I’ll rent you some office space. It’ll be great. I’ll be your silent partner, spoken of in hushed tones, but never seen. When you have to refer to me, you can call me, ‘The Mysterious Mr. Cash Machine.’ You can, I dunno, disperse ghosts and lift curses and scare away the monsters lurking under little kids’ beds. Maybe they’ll make a reality show about you.’’
    ‘‘Let’s call that ‘Plan B,’’’ she said. ‘‘I’m going to cast a divination.’’
    ‘‘And look for what?’’
    She shrugged. ‘‘Trouble, I guess.’’
    He popped another macadamia nut into his mouth. ‘‘Good luck with that. I’m going to hit the pool.’’
    After Rondeau left the suite – which had two bedrooms, and was, essentially, a very nice apartment which happened to be on the top floor of a very nice hotel – Marla went to her leather bag and took out her divination tools. She hadn’t needed them for a long time, because in her own city (scratch that, her former city), she’d had a small army of informants and people who did divinations for her. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have the knack herself.
    Marla unrolled a dark blue velvet cloth on the flowered bedspread and opened a small leather drawstring bag, shaking the contents into her palm. A tarnished three-cent silver piece from 1865; a very small diamond with a flaw in the center; an inch-long tooth from a great white shark; a sliver of petrified wood; a scattering of morning glory seeds; and a stone from the head of a toad. She shook the assemblage in her hand for a moment, letting her senses open up wide, and then tossed the items onto the cloth.
    Usually the arrangement of such objects formed patterns that, to a sufficiently receptive mind, could provide the answer to a question, or hints of likely futures.
    This time, the shark’s tooth levitated about nine inches above the rest of the objects, which began to twist around and chase one another counter-clockwise like a whirlpool on the cloth, as the tooth whirled in the opposite direction a few times before stopping and pointing firmly in the general direction of the sea.
    ‘‘Well that’s interesting,’’ Marla said.
    #
    Marla found what she was looking for on a typically lovely stretch of beach after a couple of hours of walking. She had the shark’s tooth on a string, the string wrapped around her wrist, and the tooth exerted a constant gentle tug, pulling her toward... something.
    It was her own fault,