Then I was falling, hand groping at my face while I tumbled through the dark, fingers tracing out the crude symbol on my head.
A diamond, slashed through its center with a jagged line.
“You belong to me …” The words, an echoing quake, chased me into the black.
FOUR:
Shadow Wargs
I blinked bleary eyes open as my hand flew to my forehead, shaky fingers urgently brushing over the skin, now wet and sticky. Sweat maybe? I pushed myself up onto my elbows and regarded my fingers, slick and wet. Even in the weak moonlight, shining in through a tiny window on the far wall, I could see the red stain coating the tips. But the skin beneath was unbroken, Azazel’s demonic sigil disappeared back into my imagination. I took a few deep, calming breaths, trying to slow the terrible thudding in my chest, my heart pounding against my rib cage as I stared at the blood.
Definitely more than a dream.
Cassius had been right—talking to that asswad demon had been a mistake. One I wouldn’t make again.
I sighed and flopped back down, my breathing leveling out, the slight tremble in my hands fading away. More than a dream, but over now. Still, the demonic fiend’s final words played over and over in my mind—a track stuck on repeat. “Danger comes … Danger comes … Danger comes …”
The hell was that supposed to mean?
I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter now. Probably just some friggin’ head game, designed to drag me back to his cell for more answers. Screw that jazz. He could rot in that damn hole until the world imploded or mankind was finally eradicated by an army of tyrannical, laser-wielding monkeys riding cyborg dinosaurs. Or whatever. Though personally, I’ve got my money on the crazy monkey-dinosaur apocalypse thing.
I took a deep breath and rolled onto my side, determined not to let that bastard cost me another wink of sleep. Rest is a precious thing and when the shit hits the fan, being at your best can be the difference between spinning along for another day on this merry mudball we call Earth and having your corpse force-fed into a wood chipper. Never much been a fan of wood chippers, myself. I wriggled my head deeper into the lumpy pillow, trying to get comfortable.
I stopped wiggling when I saw the eyes staring at me from a pocket of deep shadow in the corner of my room.
Electric-blue pinpricks of light, sitting above a compact lupine muzzle.
Well shit. That couldn’t be good.
I wore a pair of boxers and an undershirt, but nothing else. Thankfully, I believe paranoia is a valuable survival skill, so I did have my monster killing pistol tucked under my pillow. With an effort of will I forced my eyes shut—didn’t want to tip my hand prematurely—while slowly inching my palm toward the pistol grip. It only took a few heartbeats, but those heartbeats seemed to stretch and drag on forever.
And having my eyes closed made every terrible moment worse. I could easily imagine the thing from the shadows creeping toward me, jaws widening, claws flexing, preparing to rip my face off and turn my skin into a set of beer cozies.
I shoved away the fear and worry burrowing into my gut as my hand slid around the cool pistol grip—those emotions were luxuries I couldn’t afford. Not now. Now, I needed focus and a clear head. Simultaneously, I fought my way free from the haze of sleep still lingering in my head as I opened myself to the Vis, tapping into the deep and violent ocean of power undergirding Creation. I exhaled weariness and unease through my nose and inhaled life and power and crushing strength.
When I flicked my eyes open a second later I found the creature only a handful of feet away from me, its wolf-like body padding closer one stealthy step at a time. Pitch-black skin the texture of wet tar covered ropy muscle and sinew. Flickering shadow—emitting a faint, spectral blue light—rose from its body like steam, wavering and dancing. A mane of coarse ebony hair bordered its ass-ugly face and it moved with the deliberate pace of a lion stalking some lesser prey.
Now that it had fully emerged from the pool of inky black shadow, I knew exactly what I was dealing with: A Gwyllgi. A demonic, shade-walking doom-warg, native to the British Isles, who had a lot of unfortunate abilities—like walking through walls, for example. A large pack called Moorchester home, constantly roaming the premises. Always watching from within the shadows where they made their dens. Hiding. Stalking. Preying. Invisible until they burst from the murk and ripped your friggin’ throat out.
Except, these things were supposed to be the good guys, the hidden sentries working for team magi. If this shadowy death hound was stalking me, however, something had gone terribly, terribly wrong—like pretty much everything else in my entire life. My best guess was someone within the Guild didn’t like having me back in the fold and had circumvented the good ol’ justice system by, well … you know, releasing the hounds, which is a phrase you never, ever want to hear.
“Bad dog,” I whispered as I cocked my head away from the pillow and squeezed the trigger of my hand cannon a trio of times, the clack-clack-clack not much louder than a string of popping Black Cats. My pistol was a specialty item: .44 Magnum, dark hammer-forged steel, six-inch barrel, etched with runes and mystic symbols swirling and twisting with artful flourishes. Almost no recoil on that bad boy, and, thankfully, it had the Vis-equivalent of a suppressor, so it didn’t blow out my eardrum, which was a huge bonus.
The pillow exploded in a cloud of white fluff and the encroaching wolf staggered, swaying left, then right, as the rounds pounded into black-tar skin. Huge softball-sized holes of ass-kickery bloomed like flowers in its chest and trunk. Still, though, the hound somehow stayed on its feet. Well, its paws, if you want to get technical.
I swallowed, a deep gulp, then sighed as I watched writhing tendrils of shadow crawl over the wounds, leaving unmarred flesh behind. Sometimes life is so incredibly, ridiculously unfair. The beast leaned its head to the side, dark lips pulling back from a monstrous set of ebony fangs, which looked better suited to a friggin’ crocodile than a dog—
Worse, another pair of electric-blue eyes now coldly regarded me from the dark, a deep rumbling growl building in the air.
“Shit,” I said as the first hound threw itself forward, gliding toward me like a linebacker coming in for the sack. Assuming, of course, that linebackers could walk through shadow and take your head off with the cruel efficiency of a buzz saw.
I rolled right, pistol clenched in one fist, and dropped from the bed and onto the floor with a thud just as the Gwyllgi smashed into the mattress. I thrust out my left hand, palm up: a silver javelin of force—thin veins of purple staining the construct—burst free, slamming into the hound’s furry underside. The battering ram of Vis drove the beast high into the air, smashing it broadside into a wooden rafter with backbreaking force.
A thunderclap of cracking lumber reverberated through the room as dust and grime swirled and twirled, raining to the floor. Then—because what goes up generally comes down—the bastard dog fell straight toward me. A couple hundred pounds of bulky hound plummeting like a stone.
A polite knock caught my ear. “Mage Lazarus?” came Judge Drukiski’s voice, muffled by the thick wooden door between us. “Hate to be nosey, but it sounds like things are … Well, not okay in there. Can I come in?”
“Not a good time,” I yelled while rolling away from the bed, away from the tumbling Gwyllgi, and right into the meaty paws of the second hound. “Busy. Give me five minutes!” I shouted.
The second shadow-warg—let’s call him Fido—now towering over me, struck like a pit viper, and it was all I could do to get my arm up before the creature ripped my throat out. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sporting my badass slash-resistant jacket, which meant zero protection for my vulnerable forearm. Teeth sunk deep into my flesh; an army of jagged knives sliced through tender skin and into the muscle below.
A lightning strike of pain burst from the wound, riding through my body like a rodeo clown impaled on the horns of a rampaging bull, momentarily making thought impossible. Some deep part of me knew I needed to do
something, anything, but trying to hold onto a thought was like trying to put out a forest fire with my bare hands: impossible and horrendously painful.
“Please stand away from the door, Mage Lazarus, I’m coming in,” came a polite, but firm, reply. The door handle rattled as she wiggled the key into the lock and tried to work the thing open. Lady would only get in the way, maybe even get herself killed, but I was in no position to worry about her untimely intervention. Right now, I needed to worry about surviving the next thirty seconds.
Any thought of the worthless Judge fled as the asshole Fido began shaking its massive head back and forth, jaws crunching down, threatening to break the bone or tear my arm off at the elbow. Adrenaline and survival instinct kicked in; muscle memory, built from a thousand fights, co-opted the controls, pushing the sheer agony to the back of my mind and lending me renewed focus. Muscle memory wasn’t the only thing to rear its head, though. Something else, red and hungry, burbled up like a geyser: anger.
Blood boiling, mind-numbing, skull-shattering rage.
Some dark beast crept forth from my center, a black, burning entity extending fiery tentacles of hate through my body. Suddenly, all I wanted was to break bones and smash faces, to slay bodies by the dozens, then set this whole friggin’ cottage ablaze—just to watch it burn while I danced a victory jig around the smoldering ruins.
The door jiggled again: Judge Drukiski having trouble with the lock, which pissed me off further. True, the door was an old, creaky bastard with a helluva tricky lock—a rusty contraption obviously made by blind, unskilled monks during the Dark Ages—but that knowledge did little to appease me. All I could think about was the gall of the Guild to shackle me with some incompetent paper pusher who couldn’t even get a friggin’ door open! Why the hell didn’t she just blast the damn thing off the hinges?!
Timid incompetence, that’s why.
This was the lady I’d have to lug around with me while neck deep in the most dangerous job I’d ever worked? Utter bullshit. Her presence as my babysitter felt like a baseball bat slammed into my guts.
With that red rage pulsing in me, I turned my attention back to the Gwyllgi towering over me.
A snarl tore across my face as I used my mauled arm—still firmly lodged in the hound’s jaws—to hoist my body from the floor, drawing in toward Fido. With my free hand, I brought the pistol up to wolfie’s temple and pumped out the last three rounds in quick succession at point-blank range. Maybe these things could shrug off a couple hits to the torso and body, but getting blasted in the head sucks. Period. End of story.
And before you ask why I didn’t just shoot the first one in the head—head shots are hard, okay? Especially when you’re firing in a poorly lit room, with your pistol tucked beneath your pillow.
Fido’s head jerked left, chunks of skull and a spray of inky blood splattering the far wall as its jaws eased open, fangs sliding from my skin, which was almost as bad as having them bite down in the first place. As its maw finally opened all the way, I ripped my arm free, pulling the mangled limb to my chest, cradling it against my body, dark crimson staining my shirt, trickling off my fingertips and onto the floor in a steady drip. I glanced down during the brief reprieve and winced.
Wonderful. That arm was now effectively useless—not to mention throbbing with agonizing, bone-splintering levels of pain.
I dismissed the wound, using the Vis to draw in bedrock strength from the earth below—temporarily dulling my senses—then dropped my spent pistol. Without rounds, the gun was about as useless as that friggin’ Judge who, for the record, still hadn’t managed to get the door open …
Then, I brought my right hand to bear:
A bar of light, white and bright as the sun, ripped free from my palm, smashed into the drunkenly reeling Fido, carved a hole through its barrel-chest, then blasted out one of its rear legs. The spear of light—a powerful mix of ambient heat and braids of air—faded and died before it could punch a hole in the wall, though it did leave a brilliant purple afterimage in its wake.
Fido fell back in a stumbling retreat—bastard was getting ready to turn tail and boogie. I glanced down at my left arm, peppered with ugly puncture wounds and deep, ragged gashes, and the rage flared bright and hot in my chest. Oh no. Oh hell no. Nope to the millionth degree. I wasn’t ready to let this piece of shit limp away to lick its wounds, not after savaging my friggin’ arm.
I conjured an orb of flame above my good hand—the shimmering ball shifting from red to gold to orange before finally settling on a deep violet the color of a fresh bruise. The hound tottered back into the shadows on unsteady legs, its blue eyes locked on the flickering ball of shadow suspended above my palm. I wasn’t sure if Gwyllgi were intelligent enough to be afraid, but this one sure looked the part. And it had every right to be scared.
The floating orb, burning with cool purple light, was no regular construct.
Seepage. That was the word Cassius had used. Seepage, like radiation, bleeding through the walls of Azazel’s prison, contaminating everything. There was another word for it, though. Nox.
Once, what felt like a friggin’ lifetime ago, I’d fought an Indian horror called a Daitya—a subclass of demonic giant, banished from the material plane by God above for staging unholy war against mankind. During our spat, that ugly, four-armed freak had done something I’d never seen before. He’d unraveled a Vis construct with some sort of anti-Vis. Terrifying, confusing shit, believe you me.
That force? That anti-Vis? Nox.
If Vis is the power undergirding creation, order, and reality, Nox is the power undergirding unCreation: Destruction. Entropy. Chaos. Death. A dark energy, opposed to life. Demonic power—extraordinarily rare and strictly off-limits to mortal men and women. Even magi. Except now I was something a little more than human. Or maybe a little less.
As a Seal Bearer, with an honest-to-goodness demon cooling his cloven heels in my skull, Nox was leaking into everything I did. Into every working. Sometimes just a little—the continuous drip from a faulty faucet—sometimes a river, but always present. Nox was a freshly spilled oil slick, staining every working with a thin sheen of fetid corruption and death. Amping up every construct like a line of coke. Scratch that, like a brick of coke, a fifth of Jack, and a needle full of steroids.
The ball of glowing purple, lingering above my hand, was damn near pure Nox, blindly conjured in my rage against the shadow-warg. A mistake, but it’d be a helluva shame to watch that power go to waste.
With a lopsided smile I cast the deadly working into the gaping chest cavity I’d carved open with my light javelin. The ball of not-flame disappeared into Fido’s shadowy body, though I could see it faintly throbbing and pulsing through the creature’s dark flesh. “Eat shit and die,” I whispered with a scowl, throwing open my hand, unleashing the stored up energy currently bound by my will.
The Gwyllgi whimpered, a puppy enduring a kick to the ribs, then crumpled inward.
Bones shattered like shotgun blasts. Inky skin cracked and split. Its whole frame shrunk and diminished, folding ever inward on itself, eaten from the inside out by a monster even worse than itself. Nox wasn’t an additive force, it brought nothing to the table: rather it consumed, drawing its strength from the Vim, the life force stored in living things, meting out death and destruction without remorse.
The beast continued to twist and distort, to writhe in agony, drawing more tightly into itself, until only the purple orb remained, hanging lazily in the air, shimmering with unholy life before popping with a flash and a small whoomp of displaced air. Gone. Vanished. And Fido with it. No sign the creature had ever been here, save for its handiwork adorning my forearm.
A moment later the door to my room finally gave way, swinging open to reveal Judge Drukiski in a plaid nightgown—checkered in red, green, and blue—a tangle of unruly, sleep-tossed hair framing a confused face.
“What in the heck is going on …,” she began, the words fading away as she regarded the destruction around
the room and the remaining shadow-wolf pulling itself from the floor near my demolished bed. “Oh. Oh my word,” she finished. Then, she slowly and deliberately shuffled away from the monstrous hound rounding on her. The shadow-warg, sensing a weak and easy kill, ghosted silently toward her, matching her step for step, its fangs bared in a rictus of hunger.
“Don’t move,” I whispered, pitching my voice just loud enough for her to hear.
She whimpered, eyes wide, and nodded her head a fraction of an inch, which is precisely when the Gwyllgi lunged for her exposed neck.
FIVE:
Complications
In that moment, my options were surprisingly limited.
First, I was still sprawled on the floor with only one serviceable arm, which didn’t bode well for me or for the out-of-her-league Judge. Second, since I was already treading on awfully thin ice with the Guild, I couldn’t afford to get caught doing anything illegalish—like, say, wielding infernal anti-Vis in front of my probation officer. That would be damned near begging for a one-way ticket to Shitcreek. And, last, I couldn’t risk just blasting the holy-living-shit out of the hound with a fireball, since there was a good chance I’d tag Judge Drukiski in the process.
When it comes to violence, I tend to take the scorched-earth approach, so slinging around primal power in close quarters—especially where bystanders are a concern—isn’t exactly my strong suit.
Despite my building hatred for the Guild, I didn’t want to see the lady hurt. And, believe you me, dropping a fireball on her ass—even if she wasn’t the target—would hurt like a proctology exam conducted with a golf club. Sure, I didn’t like her and yes, she was basically the antithesis to everything I am in the world, but even my brief time with her convinced me she was a legitimately good person. A good person who was also delusional and monumentally naïve, but a good person all the same.
Certainly one who deserved to live.
Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) Page 4
