Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel by T.A. Pratt

Author:T.A. Pratt [Pratt, T.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: action, Fantasy, urban fantasy
Publisher: Tropism Press
Published: 2017-01-30T23:00:00+00:00

Suitors

Marla appeared in the throne room, where Pelham stood, dry-washing his hands like an anxious raccoon. She looked around. “Where’s Jarrell?”

Pelham gesture toward the throne. She walked around her chair (it was mostly made of fire and knives, today), and found Jarrell sitting on the floor behind the dais, his arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth, staring at a wall. “Dead,” he was saying. “This place is dead, it’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead.”

Oh, shit. “Hey. Hey, there. Are you okay?”

Jarrell looked at her, then shrank away, pressing himself against a wall. “Who are you? What is this place? Why aren’t you alive, why isn’t anything here alive?”

“Who am I? I’m—oh.” She realized she didn’t have the same face she’d worn to meet him above ground. Her default death-god complexion was a kind of icy whitish-blue, and she tended to have black eyes and pointy teeth and lips red as blood, not to mention the black tongue. She didn’t mean to look that way, but she’d read the wrong comics or looked at the wrong illustrated books of mythology or something as a kid, and her subconscious thought the queen of the dead should be a kind of cross between Hel and Kali. She covered her face with her hands for a moment, and when she removed them, she looked like the Marla he’d met before, complete with the braid. “Sorry about that. I forgot to put my face on.”

He screamed, which was understandable but unpleasant, and then he stood up and tried to run away, which was annoying. She made the corridor he ran off into form a closed curve so he wouldn’t wander off anywhere too dangerous. Maybe he’d tire himself out and come back. She turned to Pelham. “Did he say anything, or did he just go tharn straightaway?”

“He became immediately agitated upon his arrival, I’m afraid, and proved inconsolable thereafter. He said he could no longer sense the Earth, that he could not sense nature, and that he was in a place entirely dead. I attempted to explain the situation, but he did not welcome my conversational openings.”

She patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Pelly. You did everything you could. Sorry I had to drop him on top of you unannounced. There was a pressing matter to deal with upstairs, and I had to send him someplace where he wouldn’t die or go crazy.” She looked toward the corridor he’d bolted down. “I got the first one right, at least.”

“He is, I assume, your latest suitor?”

“Oh, right. I guess he wouldn’t have introduced himself. Yeah. That’s Jarrell. Nature magic guy.”

“I am not sure if he is entirely temperamentally suited to life in the underworld.”

“It could be an adjustment for him, yeah. He was a lot more impressive when he was in his element. I could have smoothed the path for him a little better, though, to be fair. I’d better see if he’s calmed himself down.” She changed the path of Jarrell’s

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