Poison Sleep by T. A. Pratt Read Free Book Online Page B

building itself.
    Someone emerged from the shadow. He wore a long, shiny black coat that flared from the waist—the sort of coat goth posers might like—and it whipped around him as he approached. His bald head looked mushroom-soft and white, but at this distance Marla couldn’t make out his features. She stepped into the wind, the air itself pushing hard against her, and shouted, “Hey, you! Piss off!”
    When the man was about fifteen feet away, a pair of long knives slid from his sleeves, hilts dropping neatly into his hands. He didn’t change his pace, and his close-set, narrow black eyes looked beyond Marla, focused on Genevieve. The canvas tatters blowing on the bone frames made her think of banners flying over medieval castles, or battle-flags on grisly standards. Marla set her legs shoulder-length apart, taking a defensive stance. Fighting weaponless against a man armed with knives could be tricky, especially with the wind trying to push her over, but Marla wasn’t going to stand by and watch Genevieve get carved up—maybe it was a knee-jerk reaction, but she tended to favor unarmed women over knife-wielding trench-coated thugs who dressed like they’d seen too many action movies.
    Several long strips of canvas tore loose from the buildings and whirled toward her. One struck her in the face, stinging her eyes and driving her back a step. Blind and in danger of suffocation, she tore at the fabric.
    As she pulled the canvas away from her face, the wind died. Marla stood holding the shred of rough fabric, then almost tumbled forward as the earth tilted beneath her.
    Everything changed again. No square, no skeleton buildings, no leafless trees, certainly no black-clad mushroom men or wailing psychic fugitives. She was back in her own icy city, standing next to a monolithic bank on a deserted street. But she still had the bit of fabric, heavy and painted to look like red brick, in her hand. She’d lost her coat, too, and she shivered.
    Marla dropped the fabric to the sidewalk and took deep breaths. She reoriented herself and realized she was not far from Rondeau’s club. Two dozen blocks away from the place where she’d first shifted into the orange-scented nightmare, a distance she’d somehow traveled without crossing the intervening space.
    Or maybe in that other place, the distances were shorter. When things got hyperspatial, Marla sometimes became disoriented. She didn’t like folded space, and found scallops in the fabric of reality unnerving. All that space had to come from
somewhere.
There were consequences to screwing around with reality so blatantly. That’s why reweavers were so dangerous. They were like genies with limitless wishes, but every wish had unforeseen consequences. The ripples could take years to show themselves, like earthquake compression waves that started out small but had the potential to become enormous and destructive over time and distance.
    She hurried on to the club, her mind already spinning through contingencies. She had to put a lid on this Genevieve situation. It was more dire than she’d realized. Having a crazy psychic on the loose was not an acceptable situation, especially when Marla had to meet with the assembled sorcerers of Felport in a few days. She’d call Langford, and they’d track down the poor lady. Maybe get him to scry for Zealand while he was at it. And if Langford’s arts couldn’t cut it, she’d grit her teeth and ask Gregor for help. Nobody was better than him when it came to nailing down the flapping gauze of future possibilities and identifying the clearest likelihoods—and if that talent made him into an arrogant bastard who always acted like he knew more than anybody else, well, that didn’t mean Marla couldn’t use him. He did owe his fealty to her, whether he liked it or not—she ran Felport, and if he didn’t like dealing with her, he was welcome to leave town, or try to overthrow her. The latter wasn’t likely. Gregor was a seer, not a