Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (41 page)

I watched for a moment, completely slack-jawed.

What in the hell was going on here? What were these things? Guardians of some sort if I had to guess. If so, they must’ve belonged to Ong.

Those thoughts were fleeting things, though, notions I didn’t have time to dwell on, what with the weapon-wielding Naga woman rushing at me. She moved like an incoming freight train, huge tail pumping, weapons spinning, her lips pulled back in a ferocious snarl.

THIRTY-TWO:

Paperwork Power

The stone woman cannonballing toward me unleashed a circular chakram—a razor sharp-discus, twin to the metal Frisbee Xena the Warrior Princess was so fond of—which sailed my way, slicing the air with a soft whistle.

I breathed out, clearing my mind, dispelling fear and worry, and moved on instinct, opening myself to the Vis, reaching into the deep ocean of power thrumming in the air of this strange shrine—unused energy just waiting to be exploited. I purposely avoided drawing on the Nox, though; couldn’t afford to touch the shit, no matter how much I needed the help. Not with Azazel’s prison so weak. Still, even without the Nox, time came to a herky-jerky crawl as power flooded into me like a crashing tsunami, sharpening every sense, filling my limbs with power and strength.

Everything lurched, slowing to half-speed, then to quarter-speed:

Explosions of power ripped at the night as the Brown-Robes unleashed a torrent of power at the incoming masonry.

A torrent of flame flashed through the dark …

A colossal rumble followed as another mage hurled a ragged chunk of stone the size of a wheelbarrow at the stone toad, broadsiding the creature, sending it skittering through a flower garden, chips of stone flying from the impact …

More flashes followed:

Blooms of orange, red, and gold flame, washing the scene with fiery power …

Misty walls of green acid, dissolving stone arms. Melting through carved weapons …

Tendrils of silver power ensnaring the stone guardians, snapping off earthen limbs. Thunderous
cracks
reverberated through the garden like gunshots …

Ferraro sailed through the air, bound, helpless, and on a flight trajectory that would likely leave her with a broken neck …

And the whole while, the deadly chakram careened toward me, eager, hungry to part my head from my shoulders. The Naga lunged, still crawling through molasses, her curved sword whipping out, ready to spill my guts onto the jungle floor.

I breathed in, and out, centering myself, preparing.

I could do this, dammit. I
needed
to do this, and if I got it wrong, even a little, everything would come apart at the seams.

On instinct, on the level of subconscious thought, my left hand crept forward, palm up, a shimmering bank of reddish fog exploding in front of me, swelling and spreading from the ground, stretching and crawling upward, forming a hazy wall higher than my head. In the same instant, I twirled, thrusting out the crook. The staff of Winter quivered beneath my palm, vibrating with a feral hunger as I channeled power through the reedy shaft. A tight globe of emerald light exploded from the end, speeding toward Ferraro—still flying, falling, careening toward the ground.

Then, before I could watch the fruit of my labors, I crouched low and hurled myself to one side, arms extended.

Time snapped back into full speed all at once, my constructs rippling into life almost as one. The chakram, less than a foot away from me, plowed into the reddish mist—a quick-and-dirty friction shield—all of the weapon’s momentum suddenly converted into intense heat turned back against the disk, dissolving the circular blade into a spray of harmless, slow-moving dust. I couldn’t see Ferraro, but I could feel my second construct—a shimmering dome of shifting greens—snap in place around her.

The hasty working enveloped her in an elastic sphere of densely packed air. Hopefully it’d cushion her tumble enough to keep her from breaking anything important. Like her neck or back or skull.

Even with the chakram gone, however, I still had a curved scimitar sweeping toward my stomach. But I was already in motion, curling into a dive that carried me just inches below the slashing blade. I tucked into a tight ball, drawing in my feet, hoping the stone Naga wouldn’t clip my ankle and chop off one of my friggin’ feet—I’d already lost more than my fair share of body parts. My arms slapped against spongy greenery—some thorn-covered shrub stabbed at my hands and face—as I rolled through a wild garden and got to my feet, spinning to face the statue.

The Naga woman barreled into my friction shield, the mist eating at her blade and her lanky arms. All eight of ’em. She hardly noticed, though, twirling with an impossibly fluid grace and speed, turning on a dime and lunging at me, a barbed trident jabbing out while a battle-axe slashed toward my noggin, intent on cleaving me clean in two—

I dropped back a step, spinning the crook as I moved, smacking the trident off course with a clumsy strike, then swinging it upward, narrowly catching the furious axe-blow along the length of the shaft.

The crook, a thin and fragile thing, didn’t look capable of withstanding such a brutal assault, but despite its appearance it was no mere object of wood. The crook was imbued with ancient fae power, made far more resilient than rock or stone. With a snarl on my lips, I sent Vis coursing through the weapon: the temperature plummeted, biting cold worked into the axe head, and ice chips formed on the stone weapon. A gentle surge of will followed and the blade exploded, stone made brittle in the intense chill.

Then, while the Naga woman stupidly regarded the jagged stump of her axe, I spun the crook in a wide arc, thrusting the curved head forward, pumping a flood of raw, unformed energy through the handle, allowing that power to be shaped by the near-sentience of the staff.

A tight ball of blue, like a knot of frozen lake ice, punched into the Naga’s stomach—or whatever might’ve passed for a stomach—like a missile. The orb of power passed through its rocky exterior like a hot knife through butter, followed by a
whomp.
Veins of blue rippled beneath the creature’s stone skin; whatever power held it together faltered, flickered, died. She probed the wound in its center with one stone hand, a look of dumb confusion on its face. Confusion gave way to puzzlement before finally turning to shock as the creature disintegrated, falling apart to hunks of freezing stone.

Poof
. A pile of dust and debris you could suck up with a shop vac.

I glanced at the crook, reminding myself of its absolute badassery, then imagined exactly how much damage the Prophet would be capable of with the weapon in his already formidable hands. That was grade-A nightmare fuel, there.

The thought was immediately interrupted as the Prophet stepped out from behind a world-class veil and sucker punched me right in the gut. Right in the friggin’ gut.

A jackhammer blow I could feel in my balls. With a
wheeze
I doubled over, air rushing from my lungs, leaving me gasping for breath, lips smacking as I fruitlessly worked to suck in oxygen.
Dammit,
that guy hit hard. The Prophet offered me a malicious grin, enjoying my sudden pain, then reached over and pried the crook from my weakened fingers. His eyes burned a hungry, demonic violet as he regarded the staff. Then, he brought the crook swishing through the air, smashing the wood against my temple, spiking me into the ground like a volleyball.

“Whole again. Complete, meat-monkey.” He closed his eyes, a look of rapture sliding over his face as his skin changed, taking on a frosty blue hue, his beard lengthened into shaggy hoarfrost, and his nails grew into gleaming, black-tipped talons. “And now, your presence is no longer required.” When he opened his eyes again, the irises were ice chips and the normally white sclera was a sea of pale purple.

“I don’t care what she wants,” he hissed, apparently arguing with himself. “I want him dead. Gone. Besides, imagine the power that we’ll have with him out of the way. With Azazel subjected to our rule.”

Then he nodded, as though coming to some internal consensus, and raised the crook. “Die,” he said, pulsing golden veins lancing up his forearms as he gathered writhing Nox and flows of frozen water in the crescent of the crook. He leveled the weapon, training it on my chest, and I knew I was dead. I couldn’t breathe, could hardly move, much less stop the deposed King of Winter, who also happened to be consorting with a fallen angel.

I sighed, gritting my teeth, curling into a ball. I’d given it my all and it hadn’t been enough—

Dizzying light flashed past my face, a wave of green, the color of lime Jell-O, streaking by, smacking directly into the Prophet. I blinked in surprise as the Prophet staggered back a step then two, the crook whipping around him in manic motion, before he finally dropped to a knee. The green wave of goop congealed, morphing into a soupy slime, further hardening into a shell of green concrete.

What the hell?

I glanced right, absolutely stupefied to find Darlene—squat, plump, paper-pushing Darlene—step free from a masterful veil of her own. And yes, the awesomesauce irony was sweet as sugared honey. She’d upgraded her wardrobe a bit since I’d seen her last, exchanging her office-casual attire for tactical black BDUs and a black cloak draped across her shoulders, trailing down her back. On her, the ensemble should’ve looked goofy as hell. Instead she looked like a major-league hard charger even though I
knew
she was a cat lady who probably sold Mary Kay products in her off time.

Then, before saying anything, she lifted a glove-clad hand, clutching a small bottle of military-grade pepper spray—the same bottle Ferraro had given her back in at Wat Naga Thong. “It sure is good to see you again,” she said, offering the Prophet a fierce smile. “When you see your friend Jack, kindly tell him you got your rear end kicked by a paper pusher.” She pressed down the actuator and unleashed a stream of clear liquid directly into the Prophet’s stupid, magnificently bearded face.

The Prophet let out a bellowing roar as the OC spray splashed across his skin and gnawed at his eyes. I’ve been sprayed with that shit more than once, and it
sucks
. It’s like getting your eyeballs tattooed or maybe having your face flayed with a dull knife while your lungs are scraped away by a belt sander. You can’t breathe or see or think, and any exposed flesh swells and distorts; it feels like drowning and burning all at once.

It’s genuinely awful. Horrendous.

Not that I felt bad for the Prophet. No one deserved it more than him. If I could, I’d force that bearded bro-hole to bathe in a vat of OC every day, three times a day, for the rest of his unnaturally long life.

The Prophet fought, thrashed, and howled, impotent to break free from the strange green insta-dry prison Darlene had laid on him. And though I had no doubt he’d be able to touch the Vis and even the Nox, pain has a funny way of keeping you from thinking clearly. Especially the blinding, skin-flaying, eye-tattooing level of pain he was currently enduring. Damn hard to be calm and levelheaded in the midst of that kind of experience, and even more so if you weren’t prepared for it.

Darlene took one long hard look at the man, who was screaming and cursing—swearing unending death and torment—gave him a cool sniff, then lobbed another blob of green goop, which splattered against his face, tendrils of the stuff wrapping around his mouth like some amorphous green squid, gagging the asshole, cutting off his colorful threats.

“That’s quite enough out of you,” she mumbled. Then, before I could do anything—like laugh my jolly old ass off—Darlene was at my side, extending me a hand, which I gladly clasped. With a grunt and an awkward shuffle, she hauled me to my feet and pulled me into a huge mama-bear hug, her arms slipping beneath mine, encircling my chest and squeezing tight. “I’m so glad to see you,” she said, speaking the words into my chest.

Instead of pulling away from the overt display of uncalled for gushiness, I slipped my arms around her and returned the hug, though only briefly. “I’m glad to see you too,” I whispered before pulling away and fighting my way free of her arms. “How in the hell did you get here?” I asked. “There’s no entry point from the Hub, not anywhere near here—closest one’s an hour south.”

“I know”—she gave me a smug grin, then tapped a finger to her head—“which is why I did a little research before coming. There’s no entry point from the Hub, but there is an exit from the Chamber of Doors, though it was one heck of a slog to get here. Thankfully, I didn’t have to make the trip alone.” She gestured behind me.

I glanced back and watched, awestruck, as a handful of men and women in matching tactical BDUs with thick cloaks trailing behind them emerged from thin air, rushing off to join the fray. Judges. Holy shit, she’d done it. She’d somehow managed to infiltrate Moorchester and liberate some friggin’ help.

Another Judge materialized from the air, slicing through from another reality, but this one had a mass of silver hair trailing all the way down her back. She turned as though sensing my gaze, and her bright green eyes lingered on me for a spell before she wheeled around and headed for the battle proper.