Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (10 page)

“Absolutely, but first we need to get away from Moorchester.”

“How?” Darlene asked, voice quaking at the realization of where we were and what lay before us. “I mean, I know
about
the doors, I’ve written hundreds of departure briefs, but I’ve never used them. Oh my God, what were we thinking?” she asked, hands rising to her face, covering her mouth in horror. “This was a terrible idea. Why did we come here? Have you used the doors? Please tell me you have.”

I nodded, though I said nothing else.

Truth be told, I had the same sinking feeling deep in my gut. Sure, I’d used the
Cubiculi ex Ostia
plenty of times during my days with the Guild, but that wasn’t to say I knew
how
to use them. Every case I’d ever worked that required use of the chamber came with a detailed guide of which doors to take and in what order. That was the real problem—the ordering of the portals. If you didn’t have a fancy dossier chock-full of directions, you needed to either (a) know the path outright or (b) be able to read the columns, with their strange script.

The problem was that script was in ancient
Enochian,
the secret language of the angels, and only a handful of magi—mostly anthropological linguists—knew how to translate the strange words and complex phrases.

But you could read it if you wanted to …
The words floated up from the back of my mind.
Enochian is my mother tongue, disciple.

Go eat a buffet of assholes
, I thought before roughly shoving the demonic voice away. I wasn’t about to take any extra help from that dick.

“You must’ve written a thousand briefings, right?” I asked. “Just think back. There’s gotta be a couple routes you’ve memorized, right?”

She hesitated for a spell, wrapping her arms tight around her chest, nodding her head up and down, up and down while she pressed her eyes closed. “There are a few places that we send agents to regularly,” she finally said. “There’s a spot Hub-side, near the
Emporium.
Or I could probably get us to Moscow or DC. But …” She halted, trailed off.

“But what?” I prompted.

“Well, none of those locations are a guarantee. I
think
I know the proper sequence, but I’ve never actually gone through the doors before. What if I get us lost?”

We lapsed into silence, the sound of our heavy breathing intruding on the quiet while my arm throbbed and pulsed, the wounds in my forearm like branding irons I couldn’t get away from. “Well, we can’t stay here,” I said eventually, glancing back toward the heavy entryway doors. “Behind us, we’ve got a pack of shadow-wargs and some asshat looking to knock us both off. So, I’ll take my chances in there”—I swept my good arm to the doors—“because at least in there we
have
a chance.”

I paused, kicking around the list of places we could get to: Moscow was a no-go. Sure, we could take a Way there, hop over Hub-side, then make our way from there, but that would take extra hours we didn’t have. As bad as I hated to admit it, I needed help—specifically medical treatment. True, I could find help in the Hub, there’s always help, but help in the Hub always comes with a price tag,
always
. DC, though. DC could work.

FBI Agent Nicole Ferraro—a smart, tough, badass gal-pal who’d been helping me get to the bottom of this shitstorm—had a condo near Quantico.

DC to Quantico was an hour’s drive, tops, and Ferraro was exactly the kind of person I needed in my corner right now. She could bandage me up, no problem, and she was a great ace in the hole if the chips were down. And right now, the chips were as down as they could be. Not to mention, I sorta missed her. I mean, we weren’t like a couple, not really, but we were
something
.

A complicated relationship, I guess.

“DC,” I said. “I’ve got a friend that can help us. An FBI agent. She’s clued in to all this. Been lending me a hand with the investigation. She’ll get us fixed up and kitted out at the very least. Might even tag along.”

“Ferraro?” Darlene asked, glancing sidelong at me.

“Yeah, how’d you know?” I asked, surprised.

“Lieutenant Commander Sullivan mentioned her by name in one of his reports. Just sorta figured that had to be her.” She scrunched up her lips, then scooted away from me, using the wall to clumsily gain her feet. “Just give me a minute, I’ll find us the first door.”

She began searching the doors lining the left wall—running her fingers gently across each door as she moved—eyeing those on the right. She came to an uncertain halt at the ninth door on the left wall, before closing her eyes, lips moving in a wordless mutter as though she were trying to read from some half-remembered brief. Tentatively she opened her eyes then took one more step to the right. “Ten.”

She extended a hand and absently patted the sleek doorway; a hollow
thud, thud, thud
filled the room.

I grunted, stood, and headed over, then placed a hand on the center of the featureless chunk of obsidian, spreading my fingers and conjuring a thin stream of Vis, which I fed into the night-dark slab of rock. The door quivered under my palm, began to hum and vibrate, the steady thrum of a generator kicking to life. I’d done this plenty of times before, but that did jack-shit to banish the butterflies flailing around in the pit of my stomach like a bunch of drunken college kids.

The hum increased, cycling faster and faster until the noise was a high-pitched whine that vibrated in my teeth. Aside from the terrible, bone-shaking hum, however, the door itself looked completely unchanged. Towering, black, unmarred. You couldn’t see through it, couldn’t tell what lay on the other side, but the
Way
was open. I wasn’t exactly sure of the
why
or
how
, but I knew each plane of existence vibrated on a certain pitch—each reality existing at a different wavelength, often overlapping. When opened, the doors vibrated at the pitch of whatever world lay beyond, and they allowed you to vibrate at the same frequency. For a time.

A second later my hand slipped
through
the door, everything from the wrist down, gone. An awfully freaky sight. But even though I couldn’t see my hand, I could feel it. A cool numbness filled my fingertips with pinpricks.

I took a deep breath. “Stay close,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at Darlene. “And whatever you do, whatever you see, keep moving.” Then I stepped through, a wave of icy power breaking over me, through me, drenching my insides in liquid nitrogen as I headed into the unknown.

EIGHT:

Shadow Worlds

A swirling fog stretched out in every direction, reminiscent of the silver mist we’d trudged through only a handful of minutes ago. This fog, however, was none of my doing, and it was cold. Cold as a frosty winter’s morning in the Rockies. My breath misted out before me, a small puff of white like cigarette smoke. Carefully, I picked my way forward, making room for Darlene. Coarse white sand crunched underfoot, and the salty tang of the sea wafted up to my nostrils while the lapping of waves—broken occasionally by the rolling crash of surf—filled my ears.

Some lonely bird, lost to the mist, squawked far overhead, its cry sharp. Hungry.

I turned back in time to see Darlene stumble through thin air, materializing in an eyeblink like some flashy Vegas magic trick. There was no doorway to mark our entry into this strange world—wherever this strange world happened to be. The fog stretched out behind us, though I caught the jagged edge of a beach further on, saw a lip of frothy water running its way up the shore, before promptly retreating back into more misty gloom. Darlene lurched toward me, bending over, hands clutching her knees as she dry-heaved.

“Good gravy, that was so awful,” she said in between spells of heaving. “I heard …”
retch
… “going through the doors was bad …”
retch …
“but I didn’t expect …” A particularly violent wave of gagging came over her, followed by a thin stream of bile, which splattered on the washed-out sand. “I didn’t expect that,” she finished, wiping a stream of vomit from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.

“It’s the resonance shift,” I replied, gaze restlessly roving over the landscape, scanning for threats. Maybe this world would prove to be harmless, but then maybe not. “Does some weird shit to your head.” I tapped my temple with one finger. “Affects equilibrium. A little like being seasick. Takes a while to get used to is all.” I trotted over and offered her a hand.

She held up one finger,
just a sec
, then spit into the dirt and stood. “Wow, this doesn’t look like what I was imagining. So gray and lifeless.”

“Yeah, let’s hope it’s lifeless.”

“Where are we? What do we do now? Where do we go?” she asked, face pale and waxy. “There should be another door somewhere, right? A Way back to the
Cubiculi
… Err, well, the
next
Cubiculi
, if I understand the process correctly.”

I nodded and rubbed at the back of my neck. “No idea where we are,” I said, “but the where doesn’t matter so much. All we have to do is follow the trail to the next door and keep on trucking till we get to DC. You see it? The trail?” I squatted down and pointed toward the water’s edge.

Snaking in front of us, running along the shoreline, was a thin trickle of golden light no thicker than a pencil and invisible to any but a mage. And only a mage who’d come through one of the doors in the
Cubiculi
. Even without looking at it, I knew it would lead us true to our next destination. Wherever the hell
that
happened to be. Each door was bound to the next, linked by a strand of energy like two tin cans connected by a tenuous length of twine.

“That’s the tether,” I said. “Connects the doors. This part’s important.” I made sure to meet her eyes “No matter what, you need to follow the tether. No matter what you see, no matter what happens, never lose the path. Get too far away from the trail and it’ll disappear”—I snapped my fingers—“just like that. Poof, gone. And you’ll never find it again. Instead, your ass will be stuck wherever here is, indefinitely. Lose the tether and the door disappears, got it? And don’t dawdle—the link has a shelf life of about ten minutes, then the connection fizzles and dies.”

She nodded her head, face stoic, resolved. “Okeydoke,” she said, forcing a weak smile into place. “Follow the tether and be quick. Sounds easy enough.”

I snorted, then shook my head. “I’m a pragmatist, not an optimist, but I guess we can hope so.” Not that I had a lot of hope. Sure,
this
world might
be benign, but one of the worlds we were going to go through was bound to try and kill us. There was always at least one.

I turned away, motioning her to follow as I set out, feet churning the sand as we moved along the shoreline, following the golden trail.

We’d only walked for a few minutes—the peaceful sound of the ocean washing over us—when I heard the gull cry again, shrieking its shrill song, only to be answered by more shrieks. The mist was thinning, retreating as we moved, and it didn’t take long to locate the birds, now circling overhead.

There were maybe ten of ’em, wheeling, spinning, darting, twenty or thirty feet above us.

They looked for all the world like seagulls—gray and white plumage covered sleek bodies and flapping wings—but the faces were wrong. They had slender orange beaks, but above those beaks sat a mass of eyes: a sprawl of green pinpricks that reminded me of a spider.

Spotters
.

“Oh gosh,” Darlene said in a hush, “what in the world are those things?” She scrunched her nose as she squinted up at the small flock. “Eww, so ugly,” she muttered.

It’d been years and years since I’d seen one of those ass-ugly suckers, and my last memory of ’em wasn’t exactly fond. “Those bastards mean trouble,” I replied in the same hushed tone, preparing the waves for a friction shield or a flame javelin. “Just stay close to me—don’t fall behind. And stay away from the water line.”

We picked up the pace, trekking ahead, though the sand hampered our movements, fighting against us, sucking at our feet with every step.

The gulls shrilled again, and though we’d made good progress, they still lingered above us. Shadowing us. Marking our position. A half-second later a foamy wave crashed off to the left, and as the water pulled back into the sea, something dragged its way onto the shore; thin pale arms towed a sinuous body with a shark’s tail where legs should’ve been.