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“And that’s why you don’t deserve to run the city,” Marla said, throwing her blankets
off and getting out of bed, letting her fury mask her true intention. “You can’t even see
why you’re unfit. Being chief sorcerer is a responsibility. It’s—”
“Consider my offer retracted,” Susan said. “You’re too stupid to live.”
Marla snatched her dagger from the nightstand and leapt across the room, slashing out
for Susan’s astral cord, but by the time she landed and struck, Susan was gone, slipped
entirely into psychic space, on the way back to her body.
“Bitch,” Marla said, kneeling there in the dark, alone. But if Susan had come here, that
meant she wasn’t deep in her preparatory meditations, and that meant Marla had a little
time yet before she cast the spell, after all.
She went back to bed, and this time she kept her dagger under her pillow.
8
F inch drove through the city in his silver Mercedes SUV, Marla sitting uncomfortably
in the passenger seat. She had an irrational dislike for riding in cars. She’d inherited a
vintage Bentley back home, but she only used it when she had no choice. Rondeau slid
from one side of the backseat to the other, peering out the windows on either side,
taking in the scenery, which was mostly hills, Victorians, and Asian eateries, as far as
Marla could see. “So where are we going?” Rondeau said.
“Golden Gate Park,” Finch said. “It’s an interesting place, historically and in terms of
magical opportunity, Marla.” He had an armchair lecturer’s voice, and Marla suspected
he liked to hold forth.
“How interesting,” she said, though she couldn’t have cared less about any aspect of
San Francisco’s history. Rondeau, however, was leaning forward to hear.
Finch said, “In the late 1800s, when the area was dedicated as park land, it was nothing
but sand dunes—that whole part of the peninsula was dunes, called the Outside Lands,
well beyond the limits of the city proper at the time. In 1868 a surveyor named William
Hammond Hall was given the job of turning that wasteland into a great urban park. The
first step, of course, was to plant grasses to hold the sand in place and keep it from
shifting constantly. After the grasses took root, they could plant bushes, trees, flowers,
and so forth. Hall tried planting some of the sturdier native grasses, but none of them
survived—they were utterly smothered by the sand. After many failed experiments with
different grasses, Hall despaired. One day he was out camping near the Chain of
Lakes—well, where the Chain of Lakes is now, the western part of the park. He had
some barley to feed his horse, but the sand, which got in everywhere, wound up in the
feed bag, and the horse wouldn’t eat the grain when it was so mixed in with sand.
Disgusted, Hammond threw the barley down on the ground. When he passed back that
way a few days later, he saw that the barley had taken root. From that point, it was
easy—first he planted barley, then grasses, and so on up to flowers, bushes, and trees.”