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primordial monsters to life and instituting a theocracy based on ritual human sacrifice,’
then, yeah, Bethany counts as a good guy.”
Bethany grinned at him, flickering her forked tongue. “I’d have expected less outrage
from one of the most notorious party-boys from the Hollywood scene.”
“I did a lot of crazy stuff, but I never ate anybody,” B said. He left the car.
“Sorry to make you uncomfortable,” Bethany said as Marla sat back down. “I didn’t
expect the subject of my eating habits to come up.”
“Right,” Marla said. “But if you don’t mind me asking, what’s the benefit? If you’re
mostly eating people who want, in their deepest hearts, to be prey animals, then it can’t
be the usual contagious-magic thing where you devour the flesh of brave and noble
adversaries in order to take their strength for your own.”
“True,” Bethany said. “It’s complicated, magically, but the gist of it is that I’m now at
the absolute pinnacle of the food chain. I am the uncontested apex predator of San
Francisco. I can eat anyone, and nothing can eat me. I run the Tenderloin, the most
dangerous part of the city, and being the best predator in a neighborhood full of human
predators is essential. You see?”
“Yeah,” Marla said thoughtfully. No mugger or killer or rapist would be able to take
Bethany out in a dark alley or something, in part because she literally did eat people like
them for breakfast.
“Plus, I like the taste,” Bethany said. “So now we wait?”
“I guess. Do you have a deck of cards?”
Bethany inclined her head toward the television monitor and the humming black
electronics. “I’ve got some good video games.”
Marla’s entire experience with video games began and ended with a brief period
working as an enforcer, many years before, when she’d had to occasionally beat
protection money out of a pimp who ran a video arcade on the side. “You mean like
Pac-Man?” Marla said.
“I think I can do better than that,” Bethany said. “Dalton made a game for me, set in San
Francisco, where an avatar based on motion-captures of me goes on a rampage to kill
off all the other bosses in the city—except Dalton, of course. It’s pretty good, and
there’s a great chaos engine, so there’s a lot of randomization every time I play. Dalton
calls it my hostile-takeover tutorial, because he made the AIs that run the enemy
sorcerers base their behavior as closely as possible on the real thing. He said in five or
ten more years he’d have fully sentient in-game avatars who really believed they were
Finch, Umbaldo, the Celestial, all of them. Once we got to that point, it would be trivial
to magically link the avatars to their real-life counter-parts, so I could hurt them at a
distance—like versatile voodoo dolls that really work. Guess I’ll never see that version
of the game now.”