Blood Engines(64)
Just then the unmistakable sound of an approaching train—the rumble, the whine, the sound of air in the tunnel being shoved along by the approaching mass—began. Rondeau stood by B, giving him some support just by his proximity. Marla took up a similar position on his other side.
“If it’s your train, you don’t have to get on,” Marla said. “I wouldn’t ask that of you. But I don’t think it’s going to be the bone train. If Bethany had a train to the underworld—any underworld—at her command, she wouldn’t be waiting her turn to run San Francisco. If she had easy access to the Land of the Dead, she’d have much more power than that.”
“Hope you’re right,” B said, almost inaudibly.
The train barreled out of the tunnel, and at a glance B visibly relaxed. This was no giant’s thighbone, but a high-tech train worthy of a technofetishist’s fantasy, gleaming black metal with accents of sterling silver and surgical steel, with an engine, and several passenger cars, of smoked glass and reflective gleam. Marla thought again that Bethany must be a fabricator. Marla herself had never given a damn about appearances, happy to live in a crumbling brownstone or ride on a filthy city bus so long as all her needs were served. But Bethany clearly reveled in the glamour of surfaces, and so might be good at illusions, and, of course, telling lies.
“All aboard,” Rondeau said, as a shining black door in the first passenger car slid open with a whuff of compressed air. Marla got on the train first. The interior matched the outside, black leather seats, and silver handrails overhead, and Marla sat down and crossed her legs. B and Rondeau sat as well.
“This is a lot nicer than the train I took to Hell,” B said.
“High praise,” Rondeau said. “I wonder who’s driving this thing?”
“Probably no one,” Marla said. “It’s probably automated. I bet there’s a little model train in Bethany’s lair, and a bit of sympathetic magic to make the big train follow the path of the little one.”
“That would be one way to do it,” said a voice from the far end of the car, closest to the engine. “But actually I just piggyback on the city’s electrical system and run my train the old-fashioned way.”
Marla stood and faced the woman who’d emerged from the engine car. “Bethany, I presume,” she said.
“And you must be Marla Mason. Trouble follows you. And, lucky me, here you are.”
12
Bethany slid the door shut behind her. She smiled, and made an odd clicking sound—after a moment Marla realized it was the sound of Bethany tapping her teeth against the ring in her lower lip. Bethany had no shortage of piercings, along with more extreme body modifications. She was pale, tall, and slender, with black hair pulled back tightly into a ponytail. Her eyes were yellow, and had horizontal slits, like a goat’s—either she’d undergone a transplant to give herself permanent bruja eyes or she was wearing novelty contact lenses. Short horns emerged from her forehead, just above her eyes, wholly subcutaneous implants, probably metal, that added to her devilish appearance. A large silver ring hung from her nose, like a bull ring, and smaller rings adorned her eyebrows and lower lip. Her earlobes had stretchers in place, though the lobes weren’t very big yet, merely the size of quarters. Light scarification decorated her cheeks—what looked like Maori designs, though Marla didn’t know enough about such things to determine their significance, if any. Bethany had brands on her bare upper arms, and a choker of thorns was tattooed around her throat. Small metal implants—ball bearings, horseshoe shapes, and blunt spikes—dotted her forearms and the backs of her hands. She wore leather pants and a leather halter-top that, Marla assumed, covered other bodily embellishments. “Come into the engine car, and we’ll talk,” Bethany said, and Marla noticed that her tongue was split for part of its length, and that the underside was not connected to the bottom of her mouth, which created an illusion of extraordinary length that accentuated the forked tongue’s serpentlike quality. Bethany turned to lead them into the engine car, revealing a crisscross of leather cords running up her back, threaded through hooks implanted into the skin on either side of her spine.
There were magical advantages to such extreme bodily modifications, Marla knew, especially in the realms of transformative magic. Bethany had altered her body’s original definitions significantly, which would make it easier to shift into other forms. Based on the design of her train, however, Marla suspected that Bethany’s principal motivations for her bodily ornamentation were cosmetic.