Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (38 page)

She shot me an eyeless wink as her hands rose into the air, fingers skimming back and forth. “Sadly, I cannot give you back your eye, nor remove the scars Beauvoir gave you”—one digit hooked into a claw, then she carefully plucked something from thin air. A glimmering strand of golden silk, clutched between thumb and index finger. “But I can take the pain and give you a well-deserved rest.”

A wave of cool power hit me in the face like a pillow, then rolled down, washing over my hearty collection of cuts, bruises, and hurts. A perfect shower that swept away the pains, washing them down some invisible drain like dirt finally coming free. When I glanced down at myself, I noticed my clothes had undergone a similar treatment—the rips and bloodstains gone, vanished as though they never were. Everything was as pristine as though I’d actually popped out of the shower and tossed on freshly laundered clothes.

She’d done this for me the last time I’d come here too, but it was still amazing to see, to experience. A miracle, far beyond my comprehension or ability. Though the miracle was far from perfect: half the world was dark. My eye was still gone, even if she’d somehow managed to steal the pain away.

Lady Fate frowned, as though guessing my thoughts, then extended a hand; the section of golden thread wriggled and writhed as it transformed into a simple cloth eye patch made of the same silky material. “A parting gift.”

I accepted it gratefully. It’d certainly do better than the strip of dirty cloth I’d been using. “Not that I don’t appreciate this”—I hefted the eye patch—“but I was just wondering if I could get another trinket for the road. Something I saw back in that armory of yours.”

Lady Fate smiled at me, a wicked grin full of devious, malicious promise. “You may have one item”—she held up a crooked finger—“provided you can carry it from this place.” She tapped at her chin. “Now, time is short and precious, so what boon will ye take and where shall we send you, Yancy Lazarus?”

I only had to think for a second.

THIRTY:

The Coup

I lounged on a brown futon, puffing away at a well-deserved cigarette, with a hardline phone sitting on my right leg and my contact book perched on my left. The futon in question was nestled in the cramped living room of my super-secret underground fallout bunker, snuggled away in the Colorado backcountry, a couple hours outside Gunnison. The Farm. My bolt-hole, armory, and safe house, all rolled into one. Nothing fancy, but it had everything a guy needed—a place to crash, a Spartan kitchen, a shitcan, a shower, a fully stocked armory, and enough wards to keep a dark-godling like the Prophet at bay.

The front room was roughly the size of a large shipping container—a couple of small cots hung from the wall, there was a couch, television, and small dining room table with a pair of padded folding chairs. It also had a bookcase full of dog-eared paperbacks, a portable electronic keyboard, and a guitar resting on a stand in the corner. A few little touches that made it feel less like a doomsday bunker and more like an awesomesauce crash pad for when you absolutely needed to sleep off a wicked hangover.

I glanced down at my contact book and punched in the number for Ferraro’s place back in Dumfries, then lifted the receiver to my ear, willing Darlene to pick up the friggin’ phone on her end. I’d already tried three times, and the calls kept going through to voicemail, but I knew she had to be there. Where else would she have gone? I finally left a curt message, hung up, then immediately tried back—she’d answer eventually if I just kept at it. Unless, of course, something had happened to her.

But, after the fourth ring, she answered, and some previously unnoticed tension melted away, running from my shoulders like hot water sluicing over my body. Maybe Darlene wasn’t the first person I’d pick as backup, but it was nice to know I wasn’t alone in this—not to mention, she had access to the best supernatural assault squad on the planet: the Fist of the Staff, my old alma mater. I had a damned ugly battle in front of me—as ass-ugly as a hairless Chihuahua in lipstick—but Darlene had the bureaucratic clout to summon the very best the Guild had to offer, and I reckoned that would even the odds.

“Yancy?” Darlene asked tentatively.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, melting back into the couch, letting the faux leather cushions draw me in deeper and deeper. “I was starting to get worried there. Thinking maybe something had happened to you.”

“Oh gee, no. Everything’s alright here. Just didn’t want to answer the phone and have it be someone from the FBI or something.”

I grunted vaguely. “Well,” I said after a lapse, “I’m glad you’re alright.”

“And what about you?” she asked without a pause. “How did things go in Haiti? Did you find the location for the Seal Bearer? Is Ferraro alright? What’s our next move? Where should I meet you?” She belted out the litany of questions like a hail of machine gun fire, hardly room for a breath in between sentences.

“Slow it down, crazy,” I said when there was finally a lull. “Let’s take those questions one at a time.”

“Sorry,” she murmured. “I’ve just been so worried. I took the liberty of looking up Cité Soleil
in the old case files, thinking that would put my mind at ease, but after reading the details on the Voodoo Daddy … Well, I only got more nervous.”

“There were some complications,” I said, trying to sound steady, confident, and unfazed instead of just wailing and weeping, which is kinda what I wanted to do. “Definitely hit a few rough patches,” I said, before launching into a brief account of events without going into too many details—poor Darlene didn’t need to know all the sordid facts regarding my alone time with Beauvoir. I also filled her in, using broad brushstrokes, on my meeting with Lady Fate—though I carefully left out some of the more
sensitive
information. Like that whole bit about me potentially becoming an evil, demon-possessed warlord.

No reason for
anyone
to know that. Not ever. I had enough problems with the Guild without them thinking I was gonna turn into a Sith Lord.

“Good gravy, Yancy,” she finally said. “I don’t even know what to say. Except, maybe, I’m glad you survived.” I could practically hear her blushing in embarrassment through the phone.

I grunted again—surviving wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “Forget about it,” I said eventually. “The only thing I really want to hear is some good news. Did you find anything on Darth-Bathrobe?”

She paused then, and though I could hear her shifting uncomfortably on the other end of the line, she was quiet for so friggin’ long I almost started to believe I’d
lost the connection. “Darlene? You still there?”

“Yes,” she replied after a too-long pause. “I just …” She trailed off.

“You just what?” I asked. “Did you find something or not?”

“Well …” She drew the word out, like she wanted to put off getting to that next word as long as humanly possible.

“I don’t have all friggin’ day here, Darlene. I’ve got places to go and bad guys to blow up, so just spit it out already.”

“I’ve found out a lot, actually,” she finally said, “but there’s no good news. All really, really bad news, in fact. That tattoo you saw? It belongs to Elder-mage
Engelbrecht
—it’s a South African military unit patch.”

All the steam left my sails in an instant.

Black Jack was Darth-Bathrobe? No. Bullshit.

Black Jack was awesome, dammit. We weren’t close, exactly, but we’d always had an amicable relationship; the guy considered himself to be somewhat of a mentor to me, I knew. And that wasn’t just lip service either—he’d been the only one on the Elder Council to stand for me when I’d called for war against the
Tuatha De Danann,
and he’d also advocated for my recent release. Why in the nine hells would he do that if he was the Shot-Caller running this whole clusterfuck? He could’ve left me in chains or he could’ve thrown his support behind the arch-mage and had me executed outright two days ago. So why keep me alive?

It didn’t make sense.

“You’re sure?” I asked, voice creaky, dry.

“Positive,” Darlene said, followed by the soft clack of fingers dancing over a keyboard. “It’s even worse than that, though,” she continued. “That fire we saw when the Gwyllgi
attacked? It wasn’t a distraction, or at least not
just
a distraction. It was a coup, Yancy. I managed to hack into the Moorchester comm relay and there’s tons of chatter. A large group of unidentified magi managed to override Moorchester’s defenses and they captured the town. From what I’ve been able to gather, there’s still a few small pockets of resistance, but mostly the battle is over and done with.

“Whoever these people are,” she said, “they struck fast and in all the right spots. An inside job, no doubt. They hit all the major guard posts before anyone knew they were there, and by the time everyone else got word, it was already too late to launch any kind of proper counterassault. The arch-mage is missing and so is Iron Stan, but the rest of the Senior Council has been detained or killed, and so have the remaining members of the Fist.

“Everything’s chaos right now, though, so it’s hard to get good intel. There are definitely casualties, twenty dead for sure— Raaj Sibia, from the Elder Council, and Ben Altschuler, from the Junior Council, for starters. Plus, others who haven’t been identified with plenty of folks still missing. Maybe dead. Maybe part of the coup. No one really knows anything, Yancy. The only thing we can be sure about is that the Guild is in shambles. It’ll take years to fix the damage, assuming it can be fixed.”

It was a damn good thing I was sitting, ’cause I would’ve fallen on my ass otherwise. My chest was too tight. My heart labored, thudding against my ribs. A cold sweat broke out across my brow and my hands became instantly clammy. I couldn’t breathe, and stars began to slowly coalesce before me, filling my limited vision. A heart attack maybe, that had to be what it was.

But, after a spell, it passed.

Not a heart attack, then. Some sort of panic attack, intermixed with a grief so deep my mind didn’t even know where to start.

Twenty dead.

Not a huge number in the grand scheme of things, but the Guild was a tight-knit group. I didn’t have much love for Raaj Sibia, but I knew Benjamin. Liked the guy, even.

We’d never been more than colleagues, maybe friendly acquaintances, but he’d stood for me in my darkest hour and I’d helped him get his grandkid, Michael, back from Old Man Winter. God, that seemed like a thousand years ago. In my mind, I could see Ben hunched over his grandson, clutching Michael’s too-pale body tight to his chest, tears streaking down his face. I didn’t know Ben very well, not really, but he was an alright guy. An alright guy with a family—one that would miss him.

A coup
, Darlene had said.

In its own way, that meant the Guild itself had suffered a death blow as well, which was just as shocking in its own right. Obviously, I had no real affection for the Guild, but it was an unbroken institution, a beacon standing against the dark things prowling in the night. Now, however, it was a shattered ruin, smashed to pieces and—like one of Beauvoir’s zombies—resurrected and forced to serve a new master. A master who trucked with dark gods, an asshole who hoped to murder humanity by the millions, billions even, and enslave the rest.

In the short term, it also meant I wasn’t going to get any help from the Guild. There would be no backup coming to support me against the Prophet and Ong. In fact, if Black Jack was dirty, calling the shots, and now in control of the Guild, it meant …

It meant that what remained of the Guild would be aimed firmly at stopping little ol’ me. ’Cause the odds weren’t already stacked against me enough.

Shit. A big ol’ heap of it, delivered to me in a picnic basket.

Darlene added another tidbit, a juicy cherry on top, confirming my suspicions: “There’s also a rumor flying around that a group of battle Judges have deployed to Thailand—they’ve got to be headed to your rendezvous with the Prophet, you think?”

“Of course they are,” I replied, voice flat and dry as the Mojave. “And Black Jack is probably with ’em.” I shook my head, those overwhelming feelings from the alley flooding back in, crushing me beneath their weight. All I wanted was to hang up the damned phone, turn on some down-and-out blues, curl up on the couch, and die. Just close my eye and die. Had a bottle of Valium in the bathroom and a bottle of Glenmorangie back in the pantry that’d get the job done right.

“So what do we do?” Darlene asked, a faint tremble running through the words.

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do, Darlene. No offense intended, but having you at my side isn’t gonna do much against a squad of battle-hardened Judges with Black Jack at the helm. You show up, you’re just gonna get yourself killed, and I don’t wanna live with that on my conscience.”

She was quiet for a moment, save for a couple of soft breaths. “We can’t give up,” she said. “There’s got to be something I can do to help.”