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Marla struck with her dagger. She made it as quick and clean as possible, but, this being
a murder, it wasn’t really quick or clean at all.
14
I f you don’t mind me asking,” Rondeau said, “how exactly are we going to get off this
train?” He leaned against a locked stainless-steel icebox, and he was actually cleaning
his fingernails with his butterfly knife, probably because he knew how cool it made him
look. The lights and power were on again. Rondeau had found the main power switch
on the control panel.
Marla was sitting at a booth, still wet from a shower in the bath car, gorging herself on a
roasted turkey she’d found in the one refrigerator that didn’t contain human parts. She
chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, then said, “I’ll think of something.”
“It’s just that there’s this little yellow minefield,” Rondeau said. “Hundreds of frogs
hopping around out there between us and the stairs.”
“Mmm,” Marla said. “You know, I was actually aware of that.” She glanced at B, who
sat at another booth, his head in his hands. “Hey,” she said. “B. Sorry you had to see
that back there, with Bethany. I had to do it. If we’d left her alive, it would have caused
us a lot of trouble later. She—”
“I know,” B said. “It’s not that. Don’t get me wrong, seeing you cut her like that, seeing
the blood spray, that wasn’t nice, but I’ve seen ugly stuff before. I didn’t like Bethany
from the moment I found out she ate people.”
“Then what is it? What’s wrong?”
B looked up at her, and Marla was shocked to see hatred in his eyes. “You’re what’s
wrong. I’ve been here, risking my life to help you, and you were prepared to make a
deal with Mutex, to let him do whatever he wanted in exchange for a few minutes with
the whatever-the-hell-you-call-it, the stone. I knew you had your own reasons for being
involved in this, but I didn’t think you’d make a deal with that monster. And after that
fucking noble speech you gave Bethany about how some things are unforgivable, of all
the hypocritical bullshit—”
“Take it easy, movie star,” Rondeau said. He wasn’t cleaning his fingernails with his
knife anymore, but he was still holding it.
“It’s okay,” Marla said. “He’s got every right to be pissed. Why don’t you tell him why
he’s wrong, Rondeau.”
“Marla wasn’t really going to make a deal with Mutex,” Rondeau said. “If he’d agreed
to take her to the Cornerstone, so much the better, but she wouldn’t have left town after
that. See, you’ve made the mistake of thinking Marla tells the truth when she’s dealing
with crazy sorcerers who want to destroy the world.”