Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (34 page)

The hell was this?

My pocket buzzed again.

The mystery phone.

I pulled the thing out with trembling fingers, my gut tight with anxiety. The cell was a cheap black burner with a wake-up alarm set to go off at five-minute intervals. I killed the alarm with a press of my finger and flipped open the phone. There was one unread text waiting for me. With a few jabs of my thumb, I opened the message and read, my blood coming to a low boil with every word.

I have Ferraro, meat-monkey. Call me at the number saved in this phone to discuss the terms of her safe release. Don’t wait too long or bad things will happen.

There was no name, no other information, but I didn’t need anything else. The Savage Prophet. That asshole had played me like a friggin’ fiddle. Somehow, he’d known I’d pull one over on Beauvoir and drag the info out of the Voodoo King. He’d been expecting it. He’d been scamming me from the get-go. Must’ve planted that damned cellphone on me in the basement, maybe when we’d been preparing to breach the club proper.

Guess it didn’t really matter when or how, only that it’d happened.

I folded the phone, slipped it back into my jacket pocket, and promptly unleashed a sledgehammer of raw force, smashing through one of the interior walls—concrete and plaster exploding in a rain of debris.

I stormed through the club, marching past the dance floor, now covered with the dead, and into the VIP lounge. I noticed a few of the tables were now empty, but not all of them. Despite everything that’d happened—the explosions, the gunfire, the zombies, the screaming—at least half the tables still housed customers. I tarried just a moment, the spidery veins of black and purple creeping up my hands and arms.

“You have two minutes to leave,” I said, my voice almost unrecognizable, demonic, “then this place is gonna burn to the ground. Two. Minutes.” Without further comment, I pushed myself through the door into the kitchen—still empty—and beelined for the basement.

I located the bookcase, shoved up against the far wall, without a hitch. Right where Beauvoir had said it would be. The case, though heavy and solid, was affixed to a heavy-duty set of hinges, and it swung out with a whisper, revealing a crude doorway, decorated with intricate and unintelligible symbols, painted directly onto the brick wall behind. I recognized the workmanship: Harold the Mange. Figures. The fat, slovenly freak had one helluva talent with the Ways, so I really shouldn’t have been too surprised.

Generally, these types of Way-points required a specific access key to operate, but with my power I could force it open without much strain. Especially with an assist from Azazel. I called up complicated weaves of Vis and Nox and swept one hand over the portal with a whisper of will. The brick doorway disappeared in a flash, leaving a pitch-black hole standing in its place. I stole a look over one shoulder, gaze sweeping around the torture chamber, my good eye landing on the gurney, stained with red.

Then, the box cutter, decorated with chunks of skin.

Finally, the melon baller with a pulpy mess in its stainless steel cup.

I raised my right hand and a wave of flame roared out, the room blistering with enough heat to melt metal, to turn that gurney into blackened slag, and to raze this charnel house to the ground. Then I stepped through the portal, letting the black hug me like a brother as Ge-Rouge
burned.

TWENTY-SEVEN:

Good Fortune

True to his word, Beauvoir’s portal let out in a dimly lit section of the Hub—a cramped alleyway, the air filled with a sour stink, the ground littered with garbage of a questionable origin and variety: broken bottles, dirty diapers, something that looked suspiciously like a hand. It was also a section of the supernatural city I knew reasonably well, just a couple blocks from a notoriously ill-reputed bar and brothel called the Lonely Mountain, which boasted a list of clientele that read like the horror shelf at the local bookstore.

I didn’t move, though. Couldn’t muster the motivation. I needed a break, a minute to breathe and think.

So instead, I lumbered over to the alleyway wall, the side of a concrete-slabbed tenement painted a dusty yellow, and plopped onto the ground, propping my back against the cool stone. Holy shit I was tired. Worse than tired. I was empty, used up, hollowed out. A husk.

Worse still, with Haiti behind me, the adrenaline was starting to wear thin. All my pain was returning in waves, slapping against my nerve endings like the ebb and flow of the ocean tide. Creeping and receding in turns. I glanced down at my hands—about the only things that didn’t hurt—and noticed the skin had turned a brilliant red the shade of broiled lobster. Like Azazel. A chill, which had nothing to do with the cold wall behind me, ran along my spine, and I broke out in a fit of shivers, great beads of sweat breaking out on my brow.

Chief Chankoowashtay, a formidable Sasquatch and the last great leader of the People of the Forest—I just called him Kong, ’cause you know, giant, hairy ape-man with a chip on his shoulder—had been the former guardian over Azazel. I remembered watching him go from a generally good-natured Bigfoot to a bright red murder-machine in the blink of an eye. His shaggy hair turned the color of a nosebleed, his eyes glowed like cigarette cherries, and thick spikes of gleaming black bone protruded along the outside of his hands, arms, and shoulders. One big ol’ scary son of a bitch.

I hadn’t known the cause for the abrupt and terrifying transformation at the time, but in hindsight I knew it was Azazel’s demonic nature asserting itself, overriding Kong’s mind and grabbing hold of the steering wheel. Was the same thing happening to me?

Carefully, I peeled off my leather jacket, cringing as the fabric scraped over the freshly carved markings etched into my shoulders. The leathery red skin extended all the way to my elbows, and spidery veins of purple and black were still spreading upward, greedy tendrils running over my biceps, past my shoulders, and clumsily reaching for my heart.

I was still holding both Vis and Nox, I realized, the opposing powers lending my body aid and keeping the pain momentarily at bay. The longer I pulled on that power, leaning on it like a crutch to keep me going, the more those veins would spread. Until, eventually, Azazel would have enough of a stronghold to boot my ass into the passenger seat, which didn’t sound like my idea of a good time. So, against every instinct, I cut myself off, pushing away the flows of Vis and Nox until the power was a distant drug, far out of reach.

Unfortunately, without that power buffering my physical senses, the terrible agony of everything that’d been done to me landed like one huge hammer blow. Felt like someone had dropped a mountain on me. A mountain made of razor blades, dirty syringes, and red-hot coals. Stars erupted in a shower before my eye—singular—nausea barreled through me like a speeding rollercoaster, and an intense combination of achy pain and fatigue settled over me like a cloak.

Fuck me.

Everything hurt, and not just the obvious things either—my friggin’
gallbladder
hurt for Pete’s sake—and with all that pain came images, flooding my brain: Beauvoir. The Prophet. Ferraro gone, taken. My eye … Each flash demanded my focus, screaming at me to pay attention. But I couldn’t. My conscious mind rejected all of it, unable to cope with my new, grim reality. My brain, instead, urged me to forget all that awful bullshit. It urged me to crawl out of this alley and into the bottom of a whiskey bottle, where I could live for the rest of my short, miserable life.

That sounded good. Sublime, even.

Get so plastered I could just ignore everything. Fuck the world. Fuck Lady Fate. Fuck the Guild. I’d given enough already, suffered more than anyone could ask of me, and I was done. So fuck everything. The world could burn to a crisp as long as I could be shit-faced while it happened.

With a groan and a muffled cry, I slid my jacket back on and righted myself, then stumbled from the alley, already moving with the lurching gait of a drunk.

I staggered over to the Lonely Mountain a few blocks away.

The building was a hulking thing made of craggy gray stone, which might’ve been transported out of the Arthurian era—part mountain, part castle. Jagged merlons ran along the top parapet, while narrow windows bled orange light and otherworldly moans and orgasmic groans of pleasure and pain. The Lonely Mountain was mostly a bar, but it also doubled as a high-class brothel.

Brothels in general are a no-go in my book—real men shouldn’t pay for women—but this place carried an extra dimension of grossness … I’d seen some of the ladies
and
gentlemen working this place. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

I marched through an open portcullis and pushed through a pair of frosted double doors that read The Lonely Mountain, followed by a stern warning,
No Fighting, No Trouble, Violators will be
Incinerated
.

The Lonely Mountain was such a popular and happening joint due, in large part, to the fact that the proprietor was a fierce and unforgiving man named Firroth the Red. Firroth wasn’t actually a man at all, but a Red Dragon—hence the
Red
part. Like most dragons, Firroth was ferociously jealous of his treasure, which happened to be his bar and brothel, and would, literally, incinerate anyone who threatened its safety. It made the Lonely Mountain a great place for business meets, though, since no one wanted to put a toe on the wrong side of the line where Firroth was concerned.

It also made it an absolutely fantastic spot to get fall-down wasted, since no one would murder you outright—at least not if you remained in the bar proper.

Gritty blues poured through the open doors.

I caught sight of a single guitar player—bent and wrinkled—hunched over a beat-up acoustic, with a smoldering cigarette poking from the edge of his mouth. The song was a low, gritty number and mean as a junkyard dog. “Bring me my Shotgun,” by Sam John Hopkins, better known as Lightnin’ Hopkins. The Lonely Mountain wasn’t a blues joint, not by any stretch. They had musicians of every stripe and variety—from punk and techno to classic Beethoven and classic rock—cycle through, so it was always a coin toss what you were gonna get.

But today?

Today, some cat was beltin’ out Lightnin’ Hopkins, the perfect tune to drink yourself into an early grave to. This was a soundtrack to die to, and that suited me fine. A lucky break, which God knew I needed.

Smoke, both the tangy aroma of tobacco and the musky, sulfurous stink always hanging around dragons, loitered in the air. Muted red, orange, and amber illuminated the cavernous interior with pockets of seedy light, though overall the bar remained a dark and foreboding place, a cave dimly seen. Hanging stalactites and jutting stalagmites littered the space, each filled with the ever-shifting light of enslaved, winged creatures.

I pushed my way through the crowd, ignoring the dirty looks I attracted from all manner of offended creatures, elbowing my way to the bar proper, always and forever presided over by Firroth himself. I pulled out a lone stool and eased my weight down onto the rough wood, which groaned beneath me. On my left, a ridiculously short man with a ruddy complexion—his feet dangling comically above the floor—drank beer directly from an oversized pitcher.
Clurichaun
. The lesser-known, drunken uncle of the leprechaun.

No pots of gold with the Clurichauns, they mostly just broke into unguarded houses and drank gallons of wine, like underage, snot-nosed high school kids, but they were great drinking buddies. Told the wildest yarns, assuming you could understand ’em through the inebriated slurring.

To my right lurked a gangly woman with warty red skin and stringy black hair. Didn’t know what she was, a halfie maybe, but it didn’t matter, so long as she stayed an arm’s length away. Putting the red-skinned freakshow from mind, I shot up a hand, catching the bartender’s golden eye.

Firroth the Red stalked up to me from the far end of the bar.

Though he was a dragon’s dragon, he wore the guise of a man—a huge and dragon-ish looking man. He must’ve stood at eight feet and had a swath of fiery-red hair, which shimmered gold and orange in the light. The guy was also built like a straight-up brick shithouse—his muscles had muscles large enough to lift weights at Venice Beach. Scrolling tribal tattoos of blues and blacks snaked up his arms and around his neck, so delicate and finely worked they looked like artful scales.

A cigar—fat, black, and reeking of dragon stink—jutted from the corner of his mouth at a rakish angle, always burning but never diminishing.

Instead of growling at me or threatening me with murder and dismemberment—pretty much a standard greeting from him—he pulled out a fat, streaky Old-Fashioned glass, then retrieved an unmarked bottle filled with something so dark and sludgy it looked closer to oil than alcohol. He uncorked the bottle and poured me a generous three fingers. The stuff seemed too thick and smelled faintly of apples, cinnamon, and old paint thinner or maybe battery acid. Hard to say exactly.