“Sure,” Marla said. “I assume there’s a catch.”
“A small one, yes. Abdicate. Name me your successor. Swear you’ll never return to Felport. That’s all.”
“How generous,” Marla said.
“Actually, it is. I could dispose of you forever, and you know it—that’s why you ran away, isn’t it? Hoping that distance would weaken my spell? But it won’t. That works for some magics, but not this one.”
At least she didn’t know about the Cornerstone. No one back home did, except Hamil, and he wouldn’t have said anything—he’d been close to Susan once, but that was a long time ago, and these days he was scarcely more fond of her than Marla was.
“We’ll see,” Marla said. “I have no doubt that one of us will be dead before this thing between us is finished.”
“Why not abdicate?” Susan said. She stepped forward, shimmering. “You know it’s the sensible thing to do. You never deserved your position. I was the one training for it, rising through the ranks, making negotiations. But you—you short-circuited everything.”
“I did it the old-fashioned way,” Marla said. “Sauvage was in charge, until Somerset killed him, taking his position. Then I killed Somerset, so I got to run the city. I am, by definition, the strongest.”
Susan laughed. “We’ll soon find out, won’t we? You never fought me.”
“Please. It would hardly be a fight. This spell you’re planning, it’s craven, and you know it. You’re afraid to face me head-on. I’ll never abdicate to you. I love Felport. I live in its streets. I believe in protecting it. You never even come out of your climate-controlled skyscraper. Why do you deserve to run the city?”
“Felport is a shithole,” Susan said. “Just another rapidly oxidizing chunk of the rust belt. But it’s a stepping-stone to bigger and better things, more power, more control. That’s all.”
“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
Finch 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.”