The weak glow from the script did allow me to see the doors, however. Thirteen of the suckers running up each side of the room. Hulking sentinels of black obsidian with no markings, no hinges, no handles. More like polished stone than actual doorways.
“I’ve read so many reports.” Darlene limped over to a stone column near the entryway and sat, legs folded beneath her. “The other Judges, the real ones, they come back with their stories. Fighting off a school of nanaue”—terrifying sharklike creatures that could swim through dirt and earth the way a great white could swim through choppy ocean waves—“in the Samoan islands. Hunting a rogue enenra in Shimamaki.” She sighed fondly. “The way they tell those stories …” She faded into awkward silence. “They just make it sound so exotic,” she finished weakly.
“I suppose I just wanted a story like that. Just one. All day, every day I listen to their stories, rubber stamp their reports, then go home, cook for my family, wash dishes, and watch an hour of TV before bed. I’m lucky if I get to a yoga class once a week. The most exciting place I’ve ever been is the Brokers of Iskdarla Shopping Emporium, over Hub-side. And I only did that once. Ate at a falafel stand and ended up with dysentery.” She clutched her stomach with one hand, as though acutely recalling the discomfort. “Took me a month to get rid of the stomach bug, and I swore that was the last time I’d ever go there.”
I moseyed over next to her and plopped onto the ground, then scooted over so my right shoulder pressed into her. For better or worse, Darlene was my partner now. We’d fought together, bled together, killed together, bullshitted our way past armed guards together, and that was a bond few people shared.
“I’m supposed to be a mage—a wielder of the primal forces,” she said, snuggling into me a little. “In reality, I’m just a boring soccer mom with a boring desk job. I was so excited when the arch-mage came to me. So excited to finally be part of something. And when I heard I was going on assignment with you? With the Yancy Lazarus? My word, I was ecstatic. That’s like getting to ice skate with Michelle Kwan. But this isn’t what I wanted. I’m cold, I’m tired, my feet hurt, my chest aches from where that Gwyllgi hit me, and I’m scared. Terrified. I may have just committed a crime against the Guild, for Pete’s sake.”
Her voice hitched a little.
Oh shit, she was on the verge of tears.
“What if something happens and I never see my husband again?” She sniffled. “John needs me. He doesn’t even know how to balance the checkbook. And my kids. Jules. Brian.” A small sob escaped her throat. “I might never see them again. I need to see them again. To tell them how much I love them.”
Well, this was awkward. Uncomfortable. As unnatural as a pig wearing a prom dress.
I’ve never been one for offering comfort. I’m not a shoulder to cry on. Mostly, I’m the guy to come to when the crying’s done and the only thing left to do is kick some ass and take some names. Still, I slipped an arm around her and patted her on the shoulder the same way you might pat a stranger’s dog. Uncomfortable or not, it was the right thing to do. She needed someone to reassure her. To tell her it was all going to be okay, even if it wasn’t.
“We’ll get you home, Darlene.” I used her first name, trying to sound relatable. Personable. “You’ll see ’em again, your family. I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.” I hoped to hell that was the truth. Sadly, in my line of work, those kinds of promises have a way of coming back to bite you in the ass.
I knew from a lot of personal experience.
“We’ll get you home,” I repeated, this time working to convince myself. “And you’ve got nothing to feel ashamed of,” I said. “I swear to God, it doesn’t matter how many times you go on assignment, it’s always miserable. Always. Believe me, I did this shit for more than twenty-five years before I left the Guild, and that’s not counting my time in Nam. Field jobs always, without exception, suck a bag full of soggy ass.
“It’s either too cold or too hot,” I continued. “You never get enough sleep or enough food. Something’s constantly trying to murder you—to mount your head on a wall or turn your innards into a festive holiday sweater. It’s always scary and that tight-bellied fear never really goes away. Even the highlights usually suck—they’re the kind of memories that are cool in hindsight, but only in hindsight. You dig it? I mean, when you’re living through those stories, you’d rather be anywhere else, doing literally anything else. IRS audit. DMV appointment. Retinal surgery. Anything.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you’re right,” she replied, “but at least you’re good at what you do. I shouldn’t be here. I thought I could do this—went to all those qualification classes—but I’m terrible at this. My first fight and I set you on fire,” she said, eyes darting toward my blistered shoulder. “Which by the way, I’m so, so sorry for. As soon as we can, I’ll get some disinfectant on that.”
“This?” I nodded toward the burned skin on my shoulder, which hurt like running face-first into a cheese grater. For the record, burns are the absolute worst. “This is hardly nothing,” I lied. “I’ve done worse with a cigarette. Besides, for your first fight, you did damned good. My first fight with the Vis was about as neat and clean as carving a turkey with a chainsaw.”
My sight hazed as thoughts of Nam tore their way through my head like the explosion of a rigged 105 round.
For a moment, I could almost hear the sound of otherworldly music, Siren song, floating on unseen currents like streams of brilliant Christmas garlands. Strings of Vis-wrought power—invisible to all, save me—dancing, swaying, burrowing inside me and the knucklehead Marines in my squad as we tromped through the Vietnamese bush. Filling us with rage and hate and fear. Turning us against each other … Men screamed in my head as I unleashed a torrent of flame, charbroiling four Dac Cong. Cooking ’em alive. Blackening skin, melting muscle, snapping bones in the intense heat.
Underneath those sounds—the screaming, the cries, the spectral music—I could hear something else. Laughter.
It was the deep rumble of a demonic chuckle, and with it came a burning sensation on my forehead. The Demonic Seal. On instinct, I reached up trembling fingers, tracing over the skin. Nothing. “I’ve always been with you,” that shit swizzler Azazel whispered inside my head. “From the beginning, you’ve been my disciple. You are mine.”
“You really mean that?” Darlene asked with another small sniffle, dispelling the demon’s voice stampeding through my skull. “That we’ll get out of this alive, I mean?”
“Absolutely, but first we need to get away from Moorchester.”
“How?” Darlene asked, voice quaking at the realization of where we were and what lay before us. “I mean, I know about the doors, I’ve written hundreds of departure briefs, but I’ve never used them. Oh my God, what were we thinking?” she asked, hands rising to her face, covering her mouth in horror. “This was a terrible idea. Why did we come here? Have you used the doors? Please tell me you have.”
I nodded, though I said nothing else.
Truth be told, I had the same sinking feeling deep in my gut. Sure, I’d used the Cubiculi ex Ostia plenty of times during my days with the Guild, but that wasn’t to say I knew how to use them. Every case I’d ever worked that required use of the chamber came with a detailed guide of which doors to take and in what order. That was the real problem—the ordering of the portals. If you didn’t have a fancy dossier chock-full of directions, you needed to either (a) know the path outright or (b) be able to read the columns, with their strange script.
The problem was that script was in ancient Enochian, the secret language of the angels, and only a handful of magi—mostly anthropological linguists—knew how to translate the strange words and complex phrases.
But you could read it if you wanted to … The words floated up from the back of my mind. Enochian is my mother tongue, disciple.
Go eat a buffet of assholes, I thought before roughly shoving the demonic voice away. I wasn’t about to take any extra help from that dick.
“You must’ve written a thousand briefings, right?” I asked. “Just think back. There’s gotta be a couple routes you’ve memorized, right?”
She hesitated for a spell, wrapping her arms tight around her chest, nodding her head up and down, up and down while she pressed her eyes closed. “There are a few places that we send agents to regularly,” she finally said. “There’s a spot Hub-side, near the Emporium. Or I could probably get us to Moscow or DC. But …” She halted, trailed off.
“But what?” I prompted.
“Well, none of those locations are a guarantee. I think I know the proper sequence, but I’ve never actually gone through the doors before. What if I get us lost?”
We lapsed into silence, the sound of our heavy breathing intruding on the quiet while my arm throbbed and pulsed, the wounds in my forearm like branding irons I couldn’t get away from. “Well, we can’t stay here,” I said eventually, glancing back toward the heavy entryway doors. “Behind us, we’ve got a pack of shadow-wargs and some asshat looking to knock us both off. So, I’ll take my chances in there”—I swept my good arm to the doors—“because at least in there we have a chance.”
I paused, kicking around the list of places we could get to: Moscow was a no-go. Sure, we could take a Way there, hop over Hub-side, then make our way from there, but that would take extra hours we didn’t have. As bad as I hated to admit it, I needed help—specifically medical treatment. True, I could find help in the Hub, there’s always help, but help in the Hub always comes with a price tag, always. DC, though. DC could work.
FBI Agent Nicole Ferraro—a smart, tough, badass gal-pal who’d been helping me get to the bottom of this shitstorm—had a condo near Quantico.
DC to Quantico was an hour’s drive, tops, and Ferraro was exactly the kind of person I needed in my corner right now. She could bandage me up, no problem, and she was a great ace in the hole if the chips were down. And right now, the chips were as down as they could be. Not to mention, I sorta missed her. I mean, we weren’t like a couple, not really, but we were something.
A complicated relationship, I guess.
“DC,” I said. “I’ve got a friend that can help us. An FBI agent. She’s clued in to all this. Been lending me a hand with the investigation. She’ll get us fixed up and kitted out at the very least. Might even tag along.”
“Ferraro?” Darlene asked, glancing sidelong at me.
“Yeah, how’d you know?” I asked, surprised.
“Lieutenant Commander Sullivan mentioned her by name in one of his reports. Just sorta figured that had to be her.” She scrunched up her lips, then scooted away from me, using the wall to clumsily gain her feet. “Just give me a minute, I’ll find us the first door.”
She began searching the doors lining the left wall—running her fingers gently across each door as she moved—eyeing those on the right. She came to an uncertain halt at the ninth door on the left wall, before closing her eyes, lips moving in a wordless mutter as though she were trying to read from some half-remembered brief. Tentatively she opened her eyes then took one more step to the right. “Ten.”
She extended a hand and absently patted the sleek doorway; a hollow thud, thud, thud filled the room.
I grunted, stood, and headed over, then placed a hand on the center of the featureless chunk of obsidian, spreading my fingers and conjuring a thin stream of Vis, which I fed into the night-dark slab of rock. The door quivered under my palm, began to hum and vibrate, the steady thrum of a generator kicking to life. I’d done this plenty of times before, but that did jack-shit to banish the butterflies flailing around in the pit of my stomach like a bunch of drunken college kids.
The hum increased, cycling faster and faster until the noise was a high-pitched whine that vibrated in my teeth. Aside from the terrible, bone-shaking hum, however, the door itself looked completely unchanged. Towering, black, unmarred. You couldn’t see through it, couldn’t tell what lay on the other side, but the Way was open. I wasn’t exactly sure of the why or how, but I knew each plane of existence vibrated on a certain pitch—each reality existing at a different wavelength, often overlapping. When opened, the doors vibrated at the pitch of whatever world lay beyond, and they allowed you to vibrate at the same frequency. For a time.
A second later my hand slipped through the door, everything from the wrist down, gone. An awfully freaky sight. But even though I couldn’t see my hand, I could feel it. A cool numbness filled my fingertips with pinpricks.
I took a deep breath. “Stay close,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at Darlene. “And whatever you do, whatever you see, keep moving.” Then I stepped through, a wave of icy power breaking over me, through me, drenching my insides in liquid nitrogen as I headed into the unknown.
EIGHT:
Shadow Worlds
A swirling fog stretched out in every direction, reminiscent of the silver mist we’d trudged through only a handful of minutes ago. This fog, however, was none of my doing, and it was cold. Cold as a frosty winter’s morning in the Rockies. My breath misted out before me, a small puff of white like cigarette smoke. Carefully, I picked my way forward, making room for Darlene. Coarse white sand crunched underfoot, and the salty tang of the sea wafted up to my nostrils while the lapping of waves—broken occasionally by the rolling crash of surf—filled my ears.
Some lonely bird, lost to the mist, squawked far overhead, its cry sharp. Hungry.
I turned back in time to see Darlene stumble through thin air, materializing in an eyeblink like some flashy Vegas magic trick. There was no doorway to mark our entry into this strange world—wherever this strange world happened to be. The fog stretched out behind us, though I caught the jagged edge of a beach further on, saw a lip of frothy water running its way up the shore, before promptly retreating back into more misty gloom. Darlene lurched toward me, bending over, hands clutching her knees as she dry-heaved.
“Good gravy, that was so awful,” she said in between spells of heaving. “I heard …” retch … “going through the doors was bad …” retch … “but I didn’t expect …” A particularly violent wave of gagging came over her, followed by a thin stream of bile, which splattered on the washed-out sand. “I didn’t expect that,” she finished, wiping a stream of vomit from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.
“It’s the resonance shift,” I replied, gaze restlessly roving over the landscape, scanning for threats. Maybe this world would prove to be harmless, but then maybe not. “Does some weird shit to your head.” I tapped my temple with one finger. “Affects equilibrium. A little like being seasick. Takes a while to get used to is all.” I trotted over and offered her a hand.
She held up one finger, just a sec, then spit into the dirt and stood. “Wow, this doesn’t look like what I was imagining. So gray and lifeless.”
“Yeah, let’s hope it’s lifeless.”
“Where are we? What do we do now? Where do we go?” she asked, face pale and waxy. “There should be another door somewhere, right? A Way back to the Cubiculi … Err, well, the next Cubiculi, if I understand the process correctly.”
I nodded and rubbed at the back of my neck. “No idea where we are,” I said, “but the where doesn’t matter so much. All we have to do is follow the trail to the next door and keep on trucking till we get to DC. You see it? The trail?” I squatted down and pointed toward the water’s edge.
Snaking in front of us, running along the shoreline, was a thin trickle of golden light no thicker than a pencil and invisible to any but a mage. And only a mage who’d come through one of the doors in the Cubiculi. Even without looking at it, I knew it would lead us true to our next destination. Wherever the hell that happened to be. Each door was bound to the next, linked by a strand of energy like two tin cans connected by a tenuous length of twine.
“That’s the tether,” I said. “Connects the doors. This part’s important.” I made sure to meet her eyes “No matter what, you need to follow the tether. No matter what you see,
no matter what happens, never lose the path. Get too far away from the trail and it’ll disappear”—I snapped my fingers—“just like that. Poof, gone. And you’ll never find it again. Instead, your ass will be stuck wherever here is, indefinitely. Lose the tether and the door disappears, got it? And don’t dawdle—the link has a shelf life of about ten minutes, then the connection fizzles and dies.”
She nodded her head, face stoic, resolved. “Okeydoke,” she said, forcing a weak smile into place. “Follow the tether and be quick. Sounds easy enough.”
I snorted, then shook my head. “I’m a pragmatist, not an optimist, but I guess we can hope so.” Not that I had a lot of hope. Sure, this world might be benign, but one of the worlds we were going to go through was bound to try and kill us. There was always at least one.
I turned away, motioning her to follow as I set out, feet churning the sand as we moved along the shoreline, following the golden trail.
We’d only walked for a few minutes—the peaceful sound of the ocean washing over us—when I heard the gull cry again, shrieking its shrill song, only to be answered by more shrieks. The mist was thinning, retreating as we moved, and it didn’t take long to locate the birds, now circling overhead.
There were maybe ten of ’em, wheeling, spinning, darting, twenty or thirty feet above us.
They looked for all the world like seagulls—gray and white plumage covered sleek bodies and flapping wings—but the faces were wrong. They had slender orange beaks, but above those beaks sat a mass of eyes: a sprawl of green pinpricks that reminded me of a spider.
Spotters.
“Oh gosh,” Darlene said in a hush, “what in the world are those things?” She scrunched her nose as she squinted up at the small flock. “Eww, so ugly,” she muttered.
Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) Page 7