Strange Magic: A Yancy Lazarus Novel

by James Hunter

  So far so good, but now I had to close the deal. Now it was time to take the fight out onto the street—I had put some distance between the creature and the home.

  Fighting from the house, and the defensive protection of its domicilium seal, was strategically advantageous for me. The same could not be said for Morse and his guys. If the demon forced its way indoors, there was a good chance lots of people would die, and not just Morse and his guys. There were also the wives, girlfriends, mothers, and children cowering in the basement to consider. A misplaced bullet or Vis construct could easily kill one of those innocents, and that was something I couldn’t abide.

  I may not be a good guy in the typical sense of the word, but I’m not a monster either. There are lines even I’m unwilling to cross.

  There was also my own livelihood to consider: the house might’ve given me a measure of safety from the creature, but it wouldn’t do me any good against a stray round, fired by some overzealous, Kevlar-clad biker. If that thing did get in the house, Morse and his crew would initiate a shoot-a-thon of epic proportions, and I didn’t want to be downrange from all those muzzles when the fireworks started. It would take everything I had to beat this nightmare and I couldn’t afford to spend any extra effort shielding myself from accidental friendly fire.

  It was for those reasons that I charged out into the night like some crazed and slightly senile dog: an old, rabid, rat-terrier chasing off a Godzilla-sized-mastiff a hundred times its size.

  The creature collided with an aluminum light pole across the street—the pole crumpled in the middle, yet remained standing, its flickering light fully revealing the thing for the first time. I hadn’t realized just how damn big it was until that moment. Sprawled across the black asphalt, I could finally get some perspective on its sheer size. Must’ve been eight or nine feet tall, and probably half as wide at the shoulders. It’d been crouched over before, hunched in on itself—the only feasible way it could have mashed itself into the house.

  Thick slabs of muscle covered the creature’s form; its dark pebbled skin was already starting to heal over the substantial damage I’d inflicted thus far. I also noticed it had two too many arms protruding from its elongated midsection. This guy must have been super handy to have around when it was time to clean beneath the sofa—why, he could lift the sofa and vacuum all at once. The supernatural baddies always get the neatest powers. Shirt shopping would be a bitch though.

  The thing that made me nervous, though, was its head. So wide it didn’t possess a neck, and surrounded completely with a jade lionesque-mane. Wide set eyes—dark and somehow vacant—framed in by a pair of curving ram horns, sprouting from the creature’s tangled hair like a couple of sickly tree trunks. It wore a towering spire crown of gold, adorned with rough-cut rubies and festooned with a string of human skulls: all yellowed with age and sporting the signs of brutal death.

  I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what I was looking at, but I had a real strong suspicion that the ugly mug belonged to a Daitya, which, if true, was bad-news-bears all around. Like someone was trying to wipe out a big part of humanity, bad news.

  The Daityas are a subclass of demonic giants who terrorized the Indian-subcontinent four thousand years ago, real Dark Ages type stuff: rape, torture, live human consumption. These things made the Mongol Horde look like a bunch of fluffy kittens prancing through a pile of yarn.

  At some point in the dusty pages of history, the Daityas had also gotten a wild hair up their collective asses to wage an unholy war against God—in cahoots with a badass demonic-serpent, the Hindus call Vritra. The axis of evil had lost, of course, because let’s face it, if you go up against the Creator of the Universe you’re going to get burned. Period. The fact that they tried, though, should tell you a little something about their overall disposition. Completely monkeys-with-laser-guns-riding-dinosaurs insane. As far as I understood, the punishment for their little revolt had been exile—banishment to a special place in Hell and denied access to our realm of existence.

  FYI, in case you didn’t get the message, God takes pretenders to the Throne very seriously.

  These things were not supposed to have access to earth. Like Cuban cigars, there was a strict embargo on these S.O.Bs. But, also like Cuban cigars, it seemed someone was smuggling one of these shitheads into our reality. Thankfully, since this thing was still being summoned through a ritual, it meant the creature hadn’t acquired enough life force, Vim, to manifest in our world on a more permanent basis. Right now the Daitya was just visiting, but the Conjurer was likely wheeling and dealing to get this thing a green card.

  The Daitya was getting to its feet, rough chunks of ice flaked away in sheets as it stretched its thick limbs.

  Shucks, why can’t the bad guys show a little good sportsmanship once in a while and just stay down?

  Holes riddled the friggin’ thing’s body—courtesy of my obsidian lawn trick—and it had hundreds of neat, square-cut patches in its skin, revealing ropey pink muscle beneath. Still, it appeared unruffled. A disturbing notion, considering the amount of thought, force, and will I’d already pumped into putting this thing down for keeps. It looked worse for the wear I guess. Still, it was standing upright and moving toward me—an implacable force of nature about to descend.

  Yay me.

  I struck out with a bar of white-hot flame, which plowed into one of the Daitya’s massive shoulders. A plume of thick, choking smoke rose into the dark as it caught fire. The creature hardly noticed. I zigzagged my bar of flame across its torso and into its groin and legs. They too caught flame, yet the creature only slowed for a heartbeat. It raised one massive claw-tipped-hand and slashed at the air, the movement sharp and precise—my lance of flame disappeared, unraveled, as though the Daitya had pulled free all of the threads of my construct. I didn’t think what had happened was possible, but there it was. The Daitya had access to some kind of Anti-Vis.

  The flames about its body died away, choked out, leaving only a faint glowing trace of orange embers behind.

  I started backpedaling as the Daitya closed the distance between us. I didn’t have much of a game plan at this point, but I knew sure-as-shit that I didn’t want this thing to get within “SMASH puny human” distance.

  Damn, it was fast.

  I pumped energy into the street, creating a layer of sludgy, hot, road tar between me and Mr. Big-and-Nasty. Each bounding step the creature took sunk it ankle deep into the road way—a mud bog of blacktop—buying me a little more time to gather distance. That worked for all of about four steps and ten seconds before the Daitya took to the air, a superman leap bringing it well into my discomfort zone.

  A massive two-handed hammer blow raced toward me with the speed and force of a fast-moving semi.

  I dropped and rolled left.

  A small impact crater bloomed in the spot I’d vacated.

  A wave of flame—a tree trunk of dragon fire—washed over me as I came to my feet. I had only enough time to condense a small bubble of air and water around myself, a loose protective shell, absorbing the flare of massive heat and jettisoning a bank of steam in return. The steam was not pleasant: it left my lungs burning and my clothes moist. Still, a helluva lot better than being charbroiled like a marshmallow during a camping trip.

  Before I had time to catch my breath, a foot broke through the hazy plane of sudden steam and caught me in the ribs, a mule kick that sent me spinning to the ground five feet away. Thank God the blow had only been a glancing one and my coat had diffused some of the impact. Even so, my ribs ached with a knife-spike of misery—a crack for sure, but maybe something more.

  I couldn’t afford to let the Daitya land another blow like that. A straight on strike would kill me. The steam bank superficially gave me a temporary advantage—it hid me from the Daitya—but it also masked its whereabouts from me, and in the end, that wouldn’t turn out well for the home team. Human beings rely heavily on sense of sight. Not so for most supernatural beings; they often possess a far grea
ter sense of both scent and hearing, giving them a huge advantage when operating in sight-restricted environments. I needed to be able to see or the Daitya would eventually blunder into me and crush some fragile and generally important part of my anatomy. Like my skull, maybe.

  I gathered in a small construct of air and propelled it outward in a semi-circle, letting the mist dissipate and granting me the vision of a rapidly incoming blue-black fist. I rolled again—I could feel the gush of displaced air as the massive appendage whipped through the space I’d occupied a moment before. Shit. This fight was going to play out in close quarters—an unavoidable truth, regardless of how much that favored the Daitya. I needed a card to play and I had one last Ace up my sleeve. With a small effort of will and a whisper, I muttered the phrase, “gladium potestatis.”

  A thin, single-edged, azure blade, about three feet in length, and looking as fragile as lace, appeared in my outstretched hand.

  FOURTEEN:

  Daitya

  Yeah, you heard right, I summoned my magic sword.

  Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: why in the world does some blues hound have a magic samurai sword? Fair question. Back in my Marine Corps days I had been something of a martial-arts fanatic—Enter the Dragon wouldn’t come out for a couple of years, but I was crazy for The Jade Bow and the Buddha’s Palm series. Those were some major formative years for me and I regret nothing. Nothing. Mock if you want, but Kung Fu is amazing and I’m too old to care what anyone thinks about my viewing preferences. At any rate, before deploying to Nam with 3rd Battalion 3rd Marines in ‘68, I’d been stationed for two years with the 3rd Mar Division out of Camp Butler in Okinawa, Japan.

  Put two and two together: goofy, awkward, young Marine with a passion for cheesy Kung Fu, stuck in Okinawa for two-years … of course I studied martial arts. It’s practically all I did for those two years. I have a somewhat shocking confession: I was not always the elegant and easy-going social butterfly I am today. I worked at a couple of different martial arts styles, even studied Kenjutsu—the Samurai art of the sword. And I practiced a lot. Like no-life, six-nights-a-week, die from starvation playing World of War Craft, a lot.

  So what about the sword? It’s important to point out that the sword is not actually a real sword, but rather a Vis construct, like any of the other constructs I frequently use. I invented it in August of ‘77, about four months after the first Star Wars film came out. Listen, Star Wars defined an entire generation. Star Wars irrevocably changed the film industry forever and shaped the way all future generations think about cinema. It was also really, really cool. Badass squared, for sure.

  I’ve always identified more with Han than with Luke, but the Jedi Lightsaber is hands down the single most badass weapon ever imagined. I mean a friggin’ sword made of light that can suddenly burst into life? Yes please. It’s like, dare I say it, magic. Took me four months, and a few significant favors, to figure out how to make the construct work. But damn if the effort wasn’t totally worth it—a functional katana made wholly of air that I could summon at will. Neato toledo doesn’t even begin to cover it.

  The Daitya closed the distance once more and rained a series of fast moving hammer blows and jabs down on me. I managed to intercept and deflect each with my blade, narrowly evading each attack. The key to using a katana well is understanding that you never want to stop a strike; for that kind of thing you need lots of muscles and a serious European broad-sword, which is all about brute force.

  Most things from Outworld have the upper hand when it comes to contests of brute force, which is precisely why the katana is such a good weapon. Kenjutsu is about movement, about redirecting force—an umbrella shedding water, say, instead of a brick wall stopping an incoming car—which means someone who is substantially weaker still has a chance in the fray. In Kenjutsu, you can make an enemy’s strength work for you.

  Our fiery tango had begun, and it was all I could do to keep from getting my head pounded into something resembling an overripe pumpkin after Halloween.

  I slid from one defensive position to another: an overhand deflection, uke-nagashi, followed by a feeble attempt at a wave counter—a sweeping feint from the right, followed by a diving roll left.

  My body twisted with the weight of the strikes.

  My back ached from rolling over pavement. My shoulders had already begun to burn from the exertion of blow and counter-blow.

  I wasn’t in the kind of shape to be going toe to toe with something this powerful—treadmills and calorie counting aren’t my thing. You only get to live once, and I’ll be damned if I make my way through life subsisting solely on salads and diet smoothies. But boy, were all those ribs and burgers coming home to roost.

  The creature’s strikes came faster and faster, a feral light had entered its nightshade eyes. It was the look of a pissed off bad-guy—I stole your lunch money, kicked your puppy, and insulted your mother, pissed off. Good. Angry bad guys don’t think clearly, which means they don’t act clearly, which means they’ll be prone to making fatal mistakes. The attacks were more powerful and harder to defend against since they lacked the coordination of any kind of formal combat. But they were also sloppy as a muck-filled pigsty.

  The Daitya was no longer a boxer working an opponent on the ropes, it was a tornado descending on an Oklahoma trailer park: left jab, swoosh. Right hammer blow—crunched into the side of a parked car, shredding metal. Mule kick, followed by a brutal stomp—pavement rippled as its foot crashed down. Uppercut, narrowly deflected by my blade.

  All rage and no grace. Completely reckless.

  There: a wild cross-body haymaker, which would’ve knocked my head from my body, propelled it passed the speed of light and right into the next century. But, I’d seen the strike coming from a friggin mile off—so telegraphed my deceased mother could have evaded with ease. And there it was, the textbook perfect target: a large patch of exposed, purple flesh, right between the creature’s overextended double arms.

  I pivoted at the hips, dropping the tip of my blade low, and slicing diagonally up and across the body—hidari jo hogiri—through the naked skin between the arms and squarely into the Daitya’s chest cavity. I’d been aiming to drive my blade all the way to the demon’s opposite shoulder—tried to split that son of a bitch in two. Sadly, I only sank the katana up to mid-sternum.

  Inky black goo leaked and sputtered from the terrible wound in places, a viscous river meandering its way to the street below. The creature was stunned, I could see bewilderment painted across its broad face. Its eyes grew a few sizes too big; massive arms floundered stupidly for the protruding sword handle, while its legs swayed and wobbled. The Daitya was a felled tree about to topple, but it wasn’t down yet.

  I tried to pull my Vis sword free, but couldn’t—it’d been thoroughly lodged in the demon’s chest, and I didn’t have the remaining stamina to wrestle the blade loose. Whatever. Wouldn’t have been able to maintain the construct for much longer anyways. The thought of doing anything more than sleeping was physically nauseating, and the thought of drawing more deeply from the Vis made me want to shoot myself in the face.

  Thankfully, I’m not that rash. Instead, I drew my pistol, leveled it at the Daitya’s grimacing mug, and shot it in the face. Six quick trigger pulls filled the night with fire, though the sound was not much greater than the pop-pop-pop of a few Blackcats going off.

  From such close proximity, my gun was highly effective. The first two rounds punched into the creature’s nose and left cheek, leaving colossal craters in the landscape of its face. The next two rounds pulverized its shocked and staring eyeballs, leaving only a couple of gapping, cavernous holes in their wake. The last two impacted the bony ridge of skull beneath the towering crown, perched so neatly atop its thick head. The Daitya began to fold in on itself. Like someone had turned on a miniature black-hole right in the center of its abdomen—a vortex in our plane of reality, recalling this crippled, otherworldly denizen.

  The form continued
to twist and distort, drawing in ever more tightly.

  With a thunder-crack of displaced air, the Daitya vanished, leaving behind only a small mountain of green goo which would further liquefy and wash away in time. I hadn’t actually killed the demon—it was far too powerful for that. I’d just damaged its assumed form so badly that it no longer had the energy to maintain a physical presence here. It was the best I could do, given the circumstances, and it had nearly killed me.

  My pistol dropped, clattering on the asphalt. Odd, since my hand seemed to be working okay. A second later, I was staring up at the stars overhead, a scattering of rough diamonds laid against velvet cloth, and had no idea how I’d gotten there. My eyes felt damn heavy, but I didn’t mind. Tired, so, so tired … I deserved to indulge in some shuteye. Yeah, I was in the middle of the street in the dark of night—not typically the best place to nap, but that thought was far away. Sleep was close, a good friend waiting to embrace me.

  I let it.

  FIFTEEN:

  Cry for Help

  Someone slapped me gently on the face, the smack-whack-smack of their palm on my cheek sounded like a soft bongo drum in my ears. And I was sleeping so peacefully. It was a woman hitting me—something I’m not entirely unfamiliar with—the soft, smooth texture of her hand and the clean sent of lilac told me as much. She was talking to me. I couldn’t understand the words themselves, they were all a jumbled assortment of mush, but her voice was soothing and kind. The voice a kindergarten teacher might use with a student who’d taken a bad fall.