There was a screech as Pierre-Francois’s wobbly stool slid back. His face swiftly contorted in fear at the mention of the name. Before anyone could speak he crossed himself then grabbed a bone-clad talisman—shaped like an open palm with an actual chicken’s eye affixed in the middle—which he promptly raised to his dusty lips in a reverent kiss.
“You do got a death wish. The both of you,” he said, then spat on the floor. “Come ’round here, talking ’bout the High Baron. Bad business, no matter who you be.” He fished a dirt-stained handkerchief from his robe pocket and mopped his forehead. His hand shook the whole while. “Hear me now, I want no part in helpin’ anyone who at cross purposes with him. You cross him, you dead or you end up zombie. Don’t matter what Loa you serve, he get you. And I will not end up wit’ my soul in a witch-jar. I will not.”
I rounded on him. “Does this have something to do with Pa Beauvoir roaming the streets when he should be a pile of bones rotting in the friggin’ ground?”
Pierre-Francois shook his head, a petulant, implacable sneer firmly in place on his worn face. “I’m not sayin’ nothin’ against the High Baron Samedi. Not him and not Baron La-Croix, neither.”
“Baron La-Croix,” I said, standing, skirting around the table and slowly edging forward until I loomed over the shriveled man. “Is that what Pa Beauvoir is going by these days?” I grabbed his musty bathrobe, nearly recoiling at the filthy layer of grime. “These days, I’ve been having a helluva time with my temper”—a surge of Nox crept in, and suddenly I was seeing through a hazy cloud of purple. I knew my eyes were glowing with otherworldly power, I could see it reflected in Pierre-Francois milky orbs—“so you’d better talk before a witch-jar seems like a nice place for retirement.”
Ferraro smoothly slipped up next to me, wedging herself between me and the old man. “No reason for this to turn ugly,” she said, first to me, then rounding on Pierre-Francois. “Please, let me help you back to your seat.” With a halfhearted smile she walked the tottering old man over to his stool and eased him down. “Now,” she said, backing up a step, “let’s be civil about this?”
“You think I’m a fool, yeah?” the boneman responded. “I know what this be. I watch your American television shows. Your Miami Vice, with Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs. You playin’ good cop, bad cop. Well, I’m not dumb.”
“Good,” Ferraro said with a flash of teeth. “I’m glad you know how this works—that’ll save time explaining it.”
“I ain’t talkin’—nothin’ you can do to me be worse than what the Barons will do. I’ve got nothin’ to say on the matter.”
She nodded her head sympathetically as he spoke, then, as he fell sullenly silent, she cocked back her fist and popped him in the jaw with a wicked right hook that sent him sprawling to the floor with a curse and a thud.
“A pox on you, woman!” he shouted, his voice a disgruntled rasp as he rubbed at his cheek. “I thought you were the good cop?”
“I am,” she replied evenly, “but good and bad are subjective terms.”
“And FYI,” I said, pulling my hand cannon and pointing it at one of his rail-thin legs, “be careful who you call poxes down on. I tend to get a little trigger happy when people start threatening my friends, douchenozzle. And bad things happen when I get trigger happy. If you need my credentials, feel free to ask your Baron La-Croix about it.” I tapped the corner of my eye with one finger, a not-so-subtle reminder that I’d blasted the Voodoo Daddy’s brain out the back of his head.
“I meant nothing by it, that curse,” he said with a sigh, then shakily pushed himself up against the wall, leaning against the concrete. He scrubbed one hand over his bald head, then twirled the hair protruding from his mole. “Gah. Fine. Ask what you would have of me,” he finally said, resigned. “I tell you what I know, but then I want you out. Gone. The sooner the better.”
Ferraro shot me a frosty look, I’ve got this. “Let’s start with this man, Baron Samedi. Tell us about him.”
Once more the old boneman crossed himself and kissed his amulet.
“There ain’t much to tell about him,” he replied softly. “He ain’t no Haitian, that much I do know. He an Azyatik, from China maybe. Show up here ’bout ten years ago—and he got power. Real power. More than any of the Loa I ever seen. He call himself Baron Samedi, the Loa Lord of the Grave. No one be that bold unless they tell the truth, and he certainly got power over the grave.
“All us bonemen know about the zombies, but he show up with zombies like no one ever seen before. He call people back from the dead. He conjure spirits like none of us ever seen. Demon snakemen, Kulev. Strange bird creatures. Not long after dat, Pa Beauvoir make his grand appearance, though everyone know he been grave-dirt for thirty years. Except he says he Baron La-Croix now. Loa incarnated. He no friend to me.” He spit again, a fat wad of phlegm that darkened the dusty floor. “But”—he shrugged his narrow shoulders—“he got power, too. And he got the blessing of Baron Samedi, so no one question him. No one.”
“And if we wanted to find Baron Samedi, where would we go?” Ferraro asked, staring down her nose at him, one hand planted on her cocked-out hip.
“The High Baron?” Pierre-Francois said after a spell. “He ain’t ’round much these days. Leaves mosta the heavy liftin’ to Baron La-Croix. Baron La-Croix, he collect tribute, run the Chimeres, keep what little peace there be. So, you wanna find the Big man, you go to the Little man.”
“Okay, then where can we find Baron La-Croix?” Ferraro asked, irritation creeping in.
“He run a big nightclub called Ge-Rouge, but”—he paused, sniffing at the air like a dog picking up on a scent—“I’m thinkin’ you won’t need to find him. No, he gonna find you.”
A moment later I heard the distant sound of thundering drums.
EIGHTEEN:
Damsel in Distress
“Keep an eye on him,” I yelled at Ferraro, bolting for the door, eating up the distance in a blink and bursting out into the courtyard, now awash with the encroaching sound of rumbling drums. The outer wall surrounding the property was too high for me to see over. So, with a blast of Vis-conjured air, I swept a heap of yellowed skulls from one of the roughhewn tables—they crashed against the ground with a dusty clatter—then slammed the table against the wall with a screech and a thump.
I hoofed it across the courtyard and mounted that sucker in a blink, scrambling to my feet, gazing out over the top of the concrete wall and onto the street beyond. I blinked, then pressed the palms of my hands into my eye sockets, trying to clear my vision because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. After a second I pulled my hands away and blinked a few more times.
Yep, still awful.
More than awful, actually.
I was boned. Seriously, seriously boned. We’d been sold out in the worst way possible.
One of the trucks I’d seen earlier meandered down the road, carrying a small contingent of AK-wielding child soldiers and—’cause my life is one horrendous blow after another—Pa Beauvoir, aka Baron La-Croix, aka the Voodoo Daddy, riding on his lameass Voodoo throne. Dammit. The pickup was flanked on either side by a trio of men, each bearing a drum. Worse even than Pa Beauvoir, though, was the ocean of undead swarming toward me like an army of fiddler crabs, all arrayed before the pickup. Maybe a hundred zombies in various states of decomposition.
There were lurching creatures, little more than walking bones, with thin, dusty skin stretched tight across rib cages, and gaunt, nose-less faces. There were bloated bodies, fresh corpses, with bellies still full of accumulated gas trapped in collapsed intestines. There were older shamblers with chalky, decayed skin, worn away in places, revealing dry, ropy muscle beneath. A few were dressed in funeral finery—dusty tuxedos or stained dresses—but most only wore filthy rags, which is likely what they wore in life too.
I had two minutes, tops, before they were on us. Two minutes to come up with one helluva game plan. Great.
I leapt from the table, hitting the groun
d hard, stumbling then breaking into a listing run, which carried me back into Pierre-Francois’s shop. “You son of a bitch.” I leveled my gun at his head. “You sold us out, didn’t you?! Didn’t you!” I roared. Some part of me was fully aware this wasn’t a productive use of the meager time I had left, but the raging inferno of white-hot fury and fear building in my chest didn’t care about that. It wasn’t concerned with practicality or pragmatism. It just wanted blood, demanded it. “How else would they have found us here?!”
“What you want from me?” Pierre-Francois snapped, not moving from his stool nor bothering to deny the accusation. “Baron La-Croix may be no friend to me, but I don’t want him as my enemy. I told you, warned you—cross him and you wind up dead or zombie. You might think”—he tapped a knobby finger against his temple—“you were not seen comin’ here, but the spirits, they serve the Barons and they see everything. Everything. If I don’t tell the Baron Yancy Lazarus paid me a visit, he would find out. Then? Then he would make me pay. So I scry him when I go to change clothes. Tell him you here.”
“What are we up against?” Ferraro asked, never taking her shotgun off the boneman. “What’s our play?”
My mouth was dry, my stomach turning back flips as bile rose in my throat. There was no play here. No good one, anyway. We were in an utterly hostile locale, our one ally had already turned on us, and there was an unstoppable army of undead marching our way, led by a man who would stop at nothing to get his hands on me.
Even if we ran, assuming we could run, which I doubted, he would catch us. And despite the fact that the Voodoo Daddy had adopted a new name, I had no illusions he’d changed as a person. He was a vindictive, psychopathic dictator who liked hurting others. He was a dickhead of the absolute worst kind, and if he got his grimy hands on Ferraro, he wouldn’t bat an eyelid about torturing her if he thought it would hurt me.
There was no way out of this. No clever plan. This was a lose-lose scenario and I was the loser, the poor sap holding the shit end of the stick. I couldn’t get away, but maybe it wasn’t a lost cause for Ferraro.
“Is there a back way out?” I asked, rounding on Pierre-Francois, who sat wilted and defeated on his stool. “You’re a shrewd old snake, so I know you’ve got a bolt-hole around here somewhere.”
He looked up at me and though his milky eyes were dead and useless, I could acutely feel his gaze and knew, somehow, he was seeing me. Really seeing me. He nodded. “It’ll do you no good, though,” he said, the answer barely more than a whisper.
“You think I don’t know that?” I yelled, voice hard and sharp as knife blade. “But it might help her.” I waved a hand at Ferraro. “She doesn’t have to get dragged down here.”
“What?” Ferraro’s eyes narrowed into fine slits. “You think I’m going to leave you to die?” The words were an indictment against me. She sounded as if I’d affronted her honor as a FBI agent, as a former Marine, and, generally, as a not-shitty human being. Though we’d done our time in the Corps years and years apart, we were both Devil Dogs—both part of a small, elite family of warfighters—and you never left one of your own behind. Never.
“You haven’t seen what’s out there,” I replied, a slight tremble to the words. “We can’t beat this, Ferraro. We can’t.” I shook my head, lips compressed into a thin cut. “But the Voodoo Daddy, he’s here for me, not you. And he’s not gonna stop until he has me. I might not be able to win, but I can hold these bastards off for a little while, long enough for you to escape—”
“For me to escape and let you die? No, that’s not how this is going to end,” she said, resolute. “You don’t get to fall on your sword. You don’t get to make yourself into a martyr. Maybe I couldn’t stop that monk from doing something asinine, but I’m not going to let it happen again. Not to you. And I absolutely refuse—refuse, do you hear me—to be turned into a princess that needs rescuing.”
“We don’t have time for this bullshit,” I said. “Just stop bumpin’ your gums for one friggin’ minute and let me talk.”
She glowered at me, but said nothing.
“Look, he’s not going to kill me, okay? Not at first, anyway. He’s got a score to settle, and Pa Beauvoir isn’t the kind of guy to offer a quick death. I’m gonna fight, you’re gonna escape, he’s gonna capture me. That’s how it’s gonna play out. After that, he’s gonna take me somewhere, probably to this club of his, and he’s gonna do bad things to me. It won’t be a quick process. He’ll drag it out for hours, maybe days, and then he’ll kill me. But as long as you’re free, you can save me. I’m not gonna be some martyr. I’m gonna be the damsel in distress and you can be the rescuing hero, okay? It’s the best chance we have.”
She turned away from me, refusing to look at me. She hadn’t accepted exactly, but I took her silence for reluctant agreement. And I knew she would agree—after all, she wasn’t stupid. She knew there was no other way out.
I speared Pierre-Francois with a glare. The man shifted awkwardly in his seat. “Please, you two-faced asshat. Please do this for me. You said Baron La-Croix is no friend to you, well here’s your chance to turn the tables. And you owe me this much, for our history. You owe me this for ringing that shitbird up in the first place. Just give her one of your charms, keep her hidden from the spirits, and get her outta here.” I faltered. “Please,” I said softly, voice cracking.
He hesitated, chattering silently to himself, arguing with some unseen thing. “Gah. Okay.” He raised his hands in surrender. “But I only do it because Nibo says so. I give her some protection, let her be invisible to the spirits.” Slowly, he stood—taking a thousand friggin’ years doing it—then took the crude amulet from around his neck, waddled over to her, and slipped it over her head. “I will show her a way out. But that is all I do. No more. Once she is out, she is none of my concern and you”—he pointed a knobby digit at me—“you I wash my hands of.”
“Thank you,” I said, clapping him on one shoulder.
The thumping, manic drumbeat was deafening now, reverberating up through the floor and into my feet.
Not much time.
I turned to Ferraro, pulling her around to face me. I cupped one hand around her chin and gently lifted her face, bringing her eyes up to meet mine as a lopsided grin pulled up one corner of my mouth. I leaned in and kissed her, lips pressing in, firm but tender. She yielded under the steady pressure, her body momentarily melting into mine as she wrapped one hand around my neck.
Then, I pulled away, even against the press of her hand.
The kiss lasted a scant second, far too short, but that was all the time we could afford. “In case I don’t make it out of this,” I said, knowing this might be the end of the line, “well, you were always too good for me, and I was damn lucky for the time we had.”
Before she could respond, I wheeled around and scurried for the door. Never was good at goodbyes. “Get her outta here,” I called over my shoulder to Pierre-Francois, “or I swear to God I’ll come back and haunt your ass until you’re pushing up daisies.” The sound of the drumming, so close, so loud, nearly drowned out my words, but I knew he heard me.
I burst through the entryway and into the courtyard, slipping past debris and crudely stacked bodies, then leapt onto the table I’d pushed up against the wall. I scrambled upright in a second and peered into the street beyond, which was now flooded with the press of bodies and the sour stink of old death and voided bowels. The truck containing the grinning Voodoo Daddy had crept to a halt a couple hundred feet out. From my vantage, I could see the top-hat-wearing dickhead grinning from ear to ear.
“It is well we meet again.” His voice boomed in the night, carried to me on conjured flows of Vis. “I have waited so long to repay you. Too long. But, here you are—walk right into my hands. A stupid fly come to visit a cunning spider.”
I said nothing because right now wasn’t the time for talk. Nope. Now was the time for killing. For cold efficiency. For remorseless brutality. For death served up by the dumpster lo
ad. I couldn’t win this bout, but I could stall ’em and I could make them pay one helluva steep price for every single inch they gained.
The first wave of zombies was at the walls of the complex, now.
Dead, rotten fingers clawed at the cement as more moved for the gate. Time to put the kibosh on that shit. I opened myself to both Vis and Nox, drawing deeply from two separate, endless wells of power, feeling life and death in equal measure flood me. Melt-your-face-off magma swelled inside, threatening to consume me, but then, on the brink of burnout, that tsunami of lava hit a sheet of artic ice, a glacier of death so vast and wide and deep not even the Vis could sear through it.
Those two forces, each enough to crush a jumbo jet or pulverize a tank to fine dust, swirled inside, pushing and fighting against one another: An unstoppable force battering futilely against an immovable object. Yin colliding and working against yang, the two churning and turning in an endless circle. Strangely, there was a completeness there, a balance that felt right. Whole. And, impossibly, there was a stable, calm place in the center of those two raging forces—the eye of some uber-tornado—and that was where my mind stayed, surrounded by death and destruction, yet safe for the time being on an island of tranquility.
A cold feral grin filled my face as I looked out on the army of undead. Maybe I was outnumbered, outgunned, and in an absolutely hopeless situation, but I was still a mage. And not just any mage. I was Yancy-friggin’-Lazarus, rambler, gambler, bluesman, Hand of Fate, and Fixer of all things shitty.
I was a wielder of secret knowledge. I had a thousand clashes under my belt. I had the power of the Vis flowing in me, and the dark energy of a fallen angel coursing through my veins. With that kind of insight and that kind of power, I could damn well remake the world in my image … Well, maybe not the whole world, but certainly this little shit-speck of a street in this shit-speck city in Haiti, which was a shit-speck island floating in the toilet bowl known as the Caribbean Sea.
Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) Page 17
