“Would you like to order anything to eat before we jump in?” Drukiski asked me as she opened the folder.
I frowned and shook my head. “Lost my appetite,” I said before taking a huge pull of my drink, which burned its way down my esophagus and landed in my belly like napalm. I grunted. At least the whiskey was good. “This shit-show isn’t gonna fix itself,” I muttered. “Let’s see what you’ve got for us.” I nodded toward the case dossier.
THREE:
Nightmares
I lay on a narrow twin bed, the mattress hard and squeaky beneath me, as I stared up at the ceiling overhead. Not exactly the Ritz, and I knew the Guild had nicer digs than this available, but apparently the arch-mage had hand-selected my temporary accommodations. Honest to God, the prison cell I’d been held in before my trial was only a step below this claustrophobic broom closet they called a guest room. Cold stone floors. Leaky ceiling. A roll away cot, made circa 1912, with a scratchy wool blanket.
Worse, I didn’t even have privacy.
The Guild had kindly offered me a rustic storage cupboard, and outside my door was an actual guestroom. Naturally, my new pal, Judge Darlene Drukiski, was snoozing there. Making sure I didn’t sneak away in the night like some gangly teenager determined to meet his equally awkward girlfriend.
I grunted and tried to push my bitterness and anger away as my thoughts wandered to the case details my new probation officer had offered me, courtesy of Arch-Mage Borgstorm. The information I needed—specifically the location of Luang Phor Ong, the Fourth Seal Bearer—was thin at best. And when I say thin, I’m talking thin as a sheet of notebook paper. Literally. The dossier with the case details contained a single sheet of legal paper, yellow and lined, with a hand-scrawled name, Abbot Sodh, and an address for a Buddhist temple over in the Hub.
Hardly worth all the bullshit I’d waded through to get that little tidbit of information. Friggin’ Guild. No, not the Guild, this was the arch-mage’s doing. I shouldn’t have expected anything else from her though. She was as shrewd and political as they came, and she never passed up an opportunity to gain some new leverage. There was never a free lunch with her.
Still, the address was something, which was a damn bit more than I’d turned up on my own. And, irritated as I was, I did need to get to that damn seal, since the asshole pulling the strings had plans to use the Fourth Seal—coupled with a manufactured disease known as the Wendigo virus—to create a global pandemic. By combining the Fourth Seal with the virus the Big Bad could make a completely loyal army of the near-dead.
I’d seen a glimpse of that nightmare future, and it was about as pretty as the inside of a construction site porta john. As if humanity didn’t have enough to worry about without throwing a seething horde of friggin’ zombies into the mix.
I breathed out and closed my eyes for what felt like only a heartbeat.
When I opened them again, however, I was no longer gazing up at the leaky ceiling of my undersized room. Instead, I stood on a narrow street, lined on either side by two-story buildings and lit with the yellow glow of evenly spaced street lamps and neon signs in a riot of hues: sapphire blue, fallout green, look-at-me red. Most of the buildings had balconies jutting out over the wide sidewalks, which were filled with umbrella covered tables, all absent of guests.
Bourbon Street, smack dab in the New Orleans French Quarter. Except it was quiet, still, and lifeless—a thing which could never be said of the real Bourbon Street.
I was dreaming … Well, not dreaming exactly, but something close enough that it made little difference.
This was my brainscape, a metaphysical representation of my psyche, which naturally resembled the Big Easy, with its hot, muggy nights, over-the-top eats, and outta-this-world music scene. Here I was at home. Here I was safe and the aches and pains of real life were distant memories, hazy and faded at the edges. The air filled with the scent of slow-roasted pork—tangy, smoky, sweet—while licks of gritty blues swirled around me, thick as cigar smoke.
A bass drum pumped, thud, thud, thud, like some underground heart; the ghost of an alto sax blared and wailed; the tinkle of black and whites lit up the night like a friendly laugh.
I knew the song: a slow, gritty version of the Blues Brothers “Riot in Cell Block Nine.” I’d been playing this same song the first time I’d met Ailia. Years and years ago, that’d been, back when I’d been doing rhythm guitar for a mostly good-natured blues crew of halfies called The Uprightmen. Ailia had been occupying my thoughts a lot these days; pretty natural, considering I was hunting the friggin’ Morrigan who currently wore her face and body like a flesh-mask.
“Stray thoughts are dangerous here, Yancy,” came a voice from behind me. My voice to be precise. “Don’t know how many times we have to go over that before it sinks in.” I glanced left, watching a dark figure, bathed in weak light from one of the hanging lanterns near a brick-fronted eatery, saunter toward me. He held a stout glass of scotch in either hand; a fat cigar hung from the corner of his mouth.
He extended one turquoise-tinged hand, offering me the second glass as he drew near me.
I took it with a thankful grunt and a nod, then pulled a long slug as I regarded the man. Cassius Aquinas. An Undine—a creature of water and spirit, permanently grafted into a piece of my soul. He was the very embodiment of my subconscious mind.
I’d saved the shifty bastard way back while working an off-the-books job for one of the high lords of Glimmer-Tir, the home of the Summer Fae. Our strange living arrangement was never meant to be a long-term thing, but needless to say things hadn’t quite worked out as planned, since I was still hauling his watery ass around inside my head. Considering all the other poor life decisions I’ve made, however, this one worked out pretty well in retrospect.
Guy was crazy helpful, like a DVR for my life—enabling me to remember things I’d forgotten, pointing out details my waking mind might overlook, helping me to find connections the more rational part of my brain would never make. And since that asshole demon Azazel the Purros moved in, he’d stepped up his game big time. Now, he acted as my inner warden, working his ass off to keep Azazel from jumping into the driver’s seat.
Ignoring the blue skin, he looked just like me: an average guy of maybe forty with short-cropped, dark hair and an unremarkable height and build. Usually, Cassius dressed a helluva lot better than me—silk pajamas or fancy Italian suits, for example, to my jeans and T-shirt combo—but not so much these days. Nope, these days he’d traded in his lounge wear for something a bit more practical: Night-dark BDUs with heavy-duty tactical riot gear strapped in place.
Instead of having “POLICE” stenciled across the chest, though, he had “WARDEN” written in glowing letters the color of hot coals. More glowing runes and sigils, each offering a small inferno of light, ran over his shoulder pads, forearm protectors, and down his shin guards. The runes pulsed in time to the beating of his heart. A tactical shotgun, glowing with spectral-green light, was slung across his back, while an otherworldly handgun—an ethereal mirror of my own Frankenstein pistol—sat in a holster on his hip.
On the opposite hip was a K-Bar, also like the one I wore on assignment or, you know, whenever—because let’s face it, you never know when you’re gonna need to shank someone in the kidney.
The change in clothing wasn’t the only difference, either. He also looked tired and too thin, which was new. His face was pale, almost gaunt, with pronounced purple bags under his seaweed colored eyes. Somehow, he seemed less substantial than his usual self.
He pulled the thick cigar from his mouth and drained his drink, which miraculously refilled as he lowered it from his lips. In this place, thought was as powerful as the Vis; you could conjure anything with a flick of the wrist and a glimmer of creativity. “Ready for the nightly tour?” he asked, before shoving the cigar back in place, inhaling deeply.
I nodded.
“Alright, let’s do this thing.” He placed one hand on my shoulder, fingers digging down, then
wheeled around, dragging me with him.
With a single step, we shifted, leaving behind the comfort of the French Quarter, manifesting before a chain-link fence with curled rows of military-grade razor wire— concertina wire—running along the top and bottom. Brass and silver placards dotted the fence at twenty foot intervals, each bearing a glimmering containment seal, meant to hold even the most stalwart demonic beings in check.
On the other side of the fence loomed the Dome.
A half-oval, big as a McMansion, protruding from the ground, surrounded on all sides by fencing and swamplands. That swamp was as nasty as a Bangkok gutter. Damp, muggy, and chock-full of brackish bog water teeming with mean ol’ crocodiles, sink pits, and poisonous mosquitos. Defenses in case Azazel breached the prison walls. Far behind us, like the glimmer of a mirage on the horizon, lay the bright, happy lights of Bourbon Street, tucked as far away from this god-awful place as possible.
Most of the dome was hidden by the night, wrapped in deep shadow, but swatches of the structure were occasionally illuminated by sweeping spotlights, perched on watch towers ringing the perimeter. Seen under the light of the sun, the dome would’ve looked like a metallic golf ball stranded in the high grass. Thick steel plates, covered in even more containment wards—green neon lights shimmering in the night—made up most of the structure.
Huge slabs of spiky, volcanic rock made up the rest of the structure, breaking through in places like jagged stone teeth biting into a tin can. The earthen spikes weren’t my doing, nor Cassius’s. Azazel was responsible for those nasty sons of bitches. Evidence of his attempts to breach the perimeter and escape. There were more spikes today than there’d been yesterday.
I grunted and nodded at the dark chunks of stone peeking through the building’s exterior. “When did that happen?”
“During your trial,” Cassius replied. “Every time you get pissed, his attacks get worse. More powerful each day.” He pulled the cigar from his teeth and frowned at the prison, eyes squinted against the night. “Bastard wrecked the inner wall. I’ve barely been able to contain the damage, and don’t even get me started on repairs.” He shook his head, then spat on the soggy dirt in disgust.
“That bad?” I asked, crossing my arms and rocking back on my heels.
“Worse than you’re thinking,” he replied stoically, which was as out of character for Cassius as the BDUs and riot gear. “And then there’s the seepage …” He trailed off, taking another deep puff on his cigar. “Maybe we’ve got Azazel under wraps, but his power, it’s like radiation. Bleeds through the walls, into the ground, the water. I don’t know how to stop it. Not sure we can stop it, not completely.” He shrugged, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
“Can I talk to him?”
“You really think that’s the smartest thing to do?” he replied. “After what happened last time?” He stole a look at a huge patch of swamp to the right, which now resembled a char-blackened tar pit. Yeah, turns out ol’ Azazel isn’t so great with temper control, and he could exploit even a small lapse in defense—evidenced by the fact that he’d tried to melt Cassius into a puddle of goop.
I sighed. “Obviously talking to this guy isn’t a smart move”—I rubbed at the back of my neck, trying to ease the headache building in my skull—“but no one’s ever accused us of being smart, right? And besides, you said it yourself, we’re not gonna be able to contain him forever. Eventually, that bastard in there”—I jabbed a finger at the dome—“is gonna find a way out, and when he does, I don’t wanna see you destroyed. Maybe there’s some way to work with that thing.”
“Let me just stop you right there,” Cassius said, holding up one hand, palm out. “There’s no way to work with something like that. None. Zero. He’s a demon, Yancy. I know you don’t see most things in black and white—a fact which I’m grateful for, truly—but this … Well, this is black and white. Demons don’t change. They don’t compromise. They don’t play nice, and if you give that scary prick an inch, he will—”
“Take a mile,” I finished.
“No,” Cassius replied. “He’ll flay your soul, lock you in a pit you’ll never climb out of, and run around in your body, just like the Morrigan did with Ailia. Don’t screw around with this monster.”
I nodded my understanding. “I still need to try. No decision is worse than a bad one. And like it or not, that guy isn’t going anywhere, so we need to make some sort of game plan. Open the gates.” I twirled my hand, let’s get it over with.
Cassius sighed long and deep, hefted his glass and killed another shot, then nodded toward the guard tower on the left. A moment later, there was a rumble and a groan as the chain-link fence retracted, pulling left, wheels crunching over gravel.
“Fine,” he said once the gate came to a screechy halt, “but I’m going on record. This is a bad idea.” With that, he set off, clomping forward in his riot gear, making for a hulking door, nearly invisible, set into the side of the dome.
To be honest, the entryway looked less like a standard door and more like the cover to a bank vault: a giant sewer lid flipped on its side and jammed into the prison wall. A ginormous fifty-ton monstrosity with a hand wheel protruding from the center. Steel bolts, thick as my arm, jutted out in every direction—each covered with ever more containment wards. To the left of the hand wheel was a steel plate the size of a pizza box, which opened a window into the dome’s interior.
After I fiddled with the elaborate locks and wards securing the window cover in place, the steel plate swung out on silent hinges. Inside was black, dark as the bottom of the ocean at midnight, but words drifted to my ears in a heartbeat.
“I knew you couldn’t stay away forever.” The voice was deep, primal. The rumble of an earthquake. A voice built for solitude and unaccustomed to speech of any kind. “It isn’t in your nature.” A pause. “Too curious.” Light bloomed in the window, a brilliant pulse of deep purple, which momentarily blinded me, before finally fading to a dull amber stained with streaks of violet, offering me a clear view of my unwelcome visitor:
A hulking figure, lounging against the far wall.
I’ve heard some fallen angels are beautiful, swoon-worthy even—the stuff of romantic dreams. Azazel? Yeah, not so much. Red skin like the blistered flesh of a burn victim covered a frame deformed with thick muscle. Splashed across his body were profane tattoos, deep gouges that bit through the skin and bled light the color of a toxic waste spill. All those markings hurt to look at—they seemed to slither and writhe when seen from the corner of the eye. Made me queasy.
I’ve studied damned near every arcane text on the market—the Liber Juatus, the Sefer Raziel Ha-Malakh Liber Razielis Archangeli, the Picatrix, the Book of Abra-Melin the Mage, the Clavis Salomonis—but none of those glyphs made sense to me. Except for the one glowing on his forehead: A strange diamond, slashed through its center with a jagged line. That one, at least, I knew.
Azazel’s demonic sigil.
These days, when I looked in the mirror, I’d occasionally see the ghostly outline of that mark burning on my own forehead.
Azazel stared at me with purple eyes set into a flat, disfigured face—his mouth a cruel gash filled with ripping teeth. Huge curling horns jutted from his brow, bobbing up and down as he absently nodded his head like he was listening to some unheard song. His feet—black hooves, attached to double-jointed knees—stretched out before him as though he were relaxing at the beach instead of stuck in some dank cell, locked in the back of my mind.
“The curious ones never make it long.” He grunted and casually held up one hand, examining the obsidian talons tipping each finger.
“Aren’t you supposed to seduce me or something?” I asked. “I thought demons were supposed to trick you into giving up control.”
“Some,” he replied with an indifferent shrug, “but not me. Vetis or Asmodeus, maybe. Balban, Mammon, Naamah—all tempters in their own right.” He shook his head, horns whooshing through the air. “But not me.” He looked a
way from me, up toward the ceiling as though there were answers contained in the dark. “You mortals assume demons are the same, but, in our way, we are as different as one human from another. Some idealists. Others greedy. Greedy for power or sex or money. A few noble. Good even.”
A hush fell over the air, profound and heavy. It was a silence that pleaded to be broken, pleaded for me to ask a question. And you? What kind of demon are you?
I didn’t want to, but that quiet seemed almost alive, and before I could stop myself the question came rolling off my tongue.
Azazel refocused his gaze on me, a harsh and hungry smile breaking across his face as though he had expected nothing else. His wings, previously folded behind his back, shot out to either side. Scaly things of gristle and sinew; reptilian appendages without a feather in sight. “I,” he said, his voice a growl, “am a conqueror. Lord of war, of chaos, of hate and rage. I live inside every heart”—he thrust out a finger toward me—“yours most of all. I need not seduce you, because I am you and you are me.
“This place”—he swept out his arm, gesturing toward the prison—“cannot contain me. Every time the fire of hate kindles in your belly, every time you use your power in rage, I am there. I am Lord of Dark Magicks and already you draw on me without noticing. The Nox already burns in you. It is only a matter of time before these walls break and then I will reign. Only a matter of time.” His lips pulled up in a snarl and then he was moving. A blur of wings and legs and claws, flashing across the prison before I could even think about responding.
“Now, though,” he said, “it is time to wake. Danger comes and we can’t have you dying before I’m done with you.” A brilliant blast of purple light filled my eyes as his hand shot through the boxy window in the door. Pain erupted in my head as one of his long talons flicked across my forehead, biting into the skin like a razor blade.
Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) Page 3