Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4)

by James A. Hunter

  “You’re wrong about your imminent victory,” I finally said. “Given, you might have the upper hand at the moment, but you haven’t won the pot, bub. I’m not sure how much of the action you’ve been paying attention to, what with all your effort to redecorate the place, but right now I’m neck deep in a pile of horse shit. A pile of horse shit located on a riverbank next to a pack of crocodiles. Man-eating, saltwater crocs with shotguns and human sentience. Which is about as bad as it gets, comprende? And, as much as you might not like it, your fate is tied to mine.”

  “If you perish,” the demon replied evenly, “I will move on.”

  “Yeah, but who knows what your next host is gonna be like. And besides, I know you’re obligated in some way to preserve my life, since I’m the Seal Bearer.”

  More silence met my ears, but this quiet seemed to be a confirmation of sorts.

  “Looking around,” I said after a beat, “I can see you’re not far from breaching my defenses, but I don’t think you’re gonna get free before that douchebag Beauvoir lays into me. If he’s anything like I remember, he’s gonna torture me for a while, then he’s gonna kill me. Or he might turn me into a living zombie. I can’t imagine either of those options are going to make things easy for you. So let’s talk. Compromise. That way we both kinda get what we want, instead of neither of us getting jack-shit.”

  “You would let yourself die to spite me?” Azazel asked, more of a cold, calculating statement of fact than a question.

  “Damn straight,” I replied. “I’m a real pain in the ass that way. If you need references you can ask anyone I’ve ever met in my entire life. But it’s not like I have a death wish, so it doesn’t have to go down that way. Not if you’re willing to deal.”

  More silence, yawning and telling. He was thinking. Scheming.

  I waited, tapping a foot impatiently, and just as I was preparing to turn and leave, a light blossomed in the depths of the cell, a pulse of purple which quickly gave way to a soft caramel glow. I’d been expecting Azazel to be lounging against the far wall like the last time I’d seen him, but instead his ass-ugly face—blistered skin, deep violet eyes, cruel mouth—loomed a few feet away from the window.

  “With your guardian gone, who do you think summoned you to this place?” he asked with a hungry, uneven smile revealing far too many razor-sharp teeth. Guy needed to get to an orthodontist, stat. “You are a valuable asset to me, and I wouldn’t see you dead when I am so close to victory. I summoned you here to lend you a small measure of aid”—he paused—“but I wanted to see you beg first.”

  I had an involuntary urge, deep and visceral, to scoot back a few steps—okay, more like a few hundred steps—but instead I held my ground, meeting his hard, inhuman gaze, refusing to flinch. Unwilling to show fear. I crossed my arms and sniffed. “First, I’m not begging, dickcheese, I’m compromising, and second, I want to know what in the hell you did with Cassius before we go any further. I swear to God”—the demon recoiled a hair at the word—“if you hurt him, I’m gonna make it my purpose in life to repay you in kind. Doesn’t even matter what it’ll cost me. You don’t screw around with my family, and Cassius is family.”

  “Calm yourself, mortal fool. First, there is no need to involve Him.” The demon pointed heavenward with one black-clawed finger, a scowl of distaste on his hideous face. “This business is between us. No room for the White King. Second, as to your water-spirit, Cassius, he lives. For now.” He repositioned himself, then swept one arm toward the rear of the room.

  With Azazel out of the way, I saw my blue-skinned counterpart: he was still wearing his riot gear, but he’d been bound in thick chains, wrapped snuggly around his arms, chest, and legs. His hands appeared to be secured behind him and a steel plate, inscribed with some kind of demonic rune, had been screwed on over his mouth, rendering him mute.

  Cassius didn’t look scared, so much as he looked supremely pissed.

  I let out an involuntary sigh of relief. Most days, that guy was a world-class asshole, but I’d been hauling him around in my head for damn near as long as I could remember, and it would kill me if anything happened to him, and not just in some abstract, sentimental sense. It might literally kill me if something happened to the Undine, since he was an actual part of me—the living incarnation of my subconscious mind.

  “I discovered him making emergency repairs,” the demon said by way of explanation. He moved his bulk forward, once more blocking Cassius from view.

  “Let him go,” I demanded, brow furrowed, eyes narrowing, mouth turning into an angry scowl.

  The beast considered this for a time, then frowned and shook his head, great horns swishing through the air. “No. But you have my word, for what little it’s worth, that I won’t harm him. He is an inferior being, but one who represents power and leverage. So, for now, he survives.”

  I curled my fist, drawing in the strange power of this place—the power of thought and imagination—getting ready to lash out in retaliation, to show this abomination who the friggin’ boss around these parts was. Then I was doubled over, my body flickering and fading as pain, a terrible agony bleeding through from my waking body, threatened to yank me away.

  “You have only a little time left,” Azazel replied, his voice indifferent, uncaring. “I have brought you here, but my power is limited and soon you will wake.”

  “Just get to your point already,” I growled.

  “I have a lesson for you.”

  “A lesson? I don’t need some School House Rock bullshit, I need help. Intervention. I need to blow shit up and slay bodies.”

  He shrugged massive, malformed shoulders. “Yet a lesson is what you’ll get.” He folded his arms and stared at with me flat, pitiless eyes.

  I wanted to protest, to cuss and swear, to blast this shithead with a spear of flame or kick his teeth in, but instead I screamed as the unbearable pain intensified in my stomach and chest. Shit, it felt like I was being drawn and quartered. Felt like someone was playing tug-of-war with my body as the friggin’ rope.

  “That pain is your soul splitting,” the demon said casually. “The longer I keep you here the worse it will become.”

  “Fine. Holy shit, whatever. Just tell me what you need to tell me!” I screamed, hunching in on myself, my hands groping uselessly at my center.

  “Good. I’m glad I finally have your ear. Here is your lesson. Vis is the power of Creation, the power of life. He”—once more the demon motioned toward the ceiling—“spoke the universe into existence, and the Vis is an ever remaining echo of those words. That echo drives creation along, maintaining the seasons, and marking all life like a thumbprint of the Creator.

  “Nox, though, is the power of death, the power of the grave. The reason why mortals are unable to tap it is because if they, clothed in their fragile mortality, were to handle such deathly, destructive energy unaided, it would drive them mad. Would sap the life from their bones and drain away the essence of their soul until they were nothing more than a husk, a shell.

  “Demons and other immortal beings of a particularly dark inclination have no such restrictions. Our essence isn’t finite, so the Nox cannot kill us, because we cannot be killed. Banished. Imprisoned. Diminished. But not killed, not even by the Nox. When a mortal seeks to use the Nox, they must draw the power through an immortal conduit—a demon, a Loa, a dark godling—who acts as a buffer. An insulator protecting the human wielder. Though the process is little understood to all but a select few humans, it is remarkably similar to the process you magi use in binding.”

  Another spasm of pain hit my center like a sledgehammer. I fell to the ground, promptly curled into the fetal position, clenched my teeth, and pressed my eyes closed, trying to block out the hurt.

  This time, the awful sensation faded to a dull ache, then mostly passed, leaving me cold and shivering. Though I wanted nothing more than to lay on the damp ground, unmoving, until I died, I steeled myself and got to my feet. No matter how shitty things are, you always
want to face your enemies on your feet.

  “Is that it?” I grunted through clenched teeth.

  The demon nodded, a minuscule dip of his horned head. “That is the lesson I wanted to impart to you. A small gift of goodwill.”

  “Could I maybe trade that small gift in for a friggin’ rocket launcher? ’Cause it seems like a rocket launcher would be way more helpful.”

  He snorted, eyes aglow, then slowly unfurled his massive, decayed wings—from tip to leathery tip, his wingspan must’ve been twenty-five feet. Maybe more. “I am a fallen angel. I walked in the presence of the divine Creator, basked in the light of His power and stood in the shadow of his might—and yet still I rebelled. I am a conqueror, a warrior, a murderer, a horseman of the Apocalypse. I command the legions of hell. I am not here to coddle you as a newborn child. I have given you everything you need. If you are too stupid to figure out the answer to your problem, then you deserve to die. Only the fit, the smart, the cunning deserve life. Prove yourself worthy or burn.”

  He pumped his wings, a great contracting of powerful muscles, and a gust of fetid, scalding air blasted me in the face, carrying with it the scent of burnt meat and sulphur. Then, I was tumbling, rising into the air, falling away from the rocky prison and back toward my petrified body, carried on that single, powerful gust.

  TWENTY-TWO:

  Ge-Rouge

  The music hit me first—a manic blend of sounds like the spawn of a voodoo ceremony, New Orleans blues, and Caribbean reggae. I don’t know how long I’d been out, but when I woke I was still in the coffin, the lid shut tight, blocking out all light, though the muted music trickled in. My eyes were open—I could tell because they felt as dry and dusty as the Sahara Desert during a drought—stuck that way by whatever the hell was in that powder I’d been dosed with.

  Next, I noticed the bugs.

  Chitinous bodies nestled beneath my jeans, occasionally scuttling along my shins and thighs. There was something cold and segmented with far too many legs lying across the back of my right hand. Hairy legs brushed along my cheek as something scurried by, and though I wanted to cry out—to scream my friggin’ head off like a little girl while I slapped frantically at the exoskeleton-clad forms—I couldn’t. I could feel everything, but I couldn’t move a muscle.

  I reached out for the Vis, wanting that energy, that life, to fill me up with purpose and strength. I wanted to roast the skittering bodies, even if it burned me in the process; anything to have the damned things gone. But as I strained my mind and will outward, reaching for the power undergirding reality, I came up short. Whatever toxin Beauvoir’s goon had used on me had apparently paralyzed the internal muscles I needed to draw in the wild, life-giving Vis. I was full of rage and fear and hate, yet I was impotent to act.

  There was no escape here, no way out.

  The coffin lid flew open a moment later; harsh strobing light rained down on me from above, stabbing into my forever-open eyes like a thousand knife blows. Flickering green, flashing purple, and sporadic red lighting washed over the interior of what had to be Beauvoir’s nightclub, Ge-Rouge. Except it wasn’t like any nightclub I’d ever been to before, and I’ve been to a lot of skeezy booze-dens. This place was an ol’ timey French colonial mansion, which seemed a perfect reflection of Pa Beauvoir himself: gaudy, loud, and painfully obnoxious.

  The interior was a series of large, blocky rooms filled with pillars, vaulted ceilings, and accented by gracefully tall windows. But everything was grimy and broken: The floorboards worn thin from years of use. The elegant windows bricked over. The masonry crumbling. The paint cracked, peeling, and splashed with brilliant graffiti, which glowed in vibrant shades of green and white and orange.

  The graffiti itself was a combination of ritualistic voodoo—many sigils identical to the ones I’d seen in Pierre-Francois’s shop—intermixed with bizarre, macabre artwork: magnificent, brilliantly painted skulls; dancing skeletons, glowing with pale, otherworldly light; bodies, being ripped apart by blank-faced undead.

  People crowded the floors, dark-skinned men and women, many naked or nearly so, covered only with greasy white chalk, dancing and grinding to the strange tunes filling the air. Most likely, these were the same folks I’d seen in the procession earlier on.

  I caught a glimpse of the band.

  A small army of drummers hammered out complicated, ever changing beats that compelled listeners to shuffle their feet and move their hips. A quartet of horn players—trumpet, trombone, sax, and French horn—blared out beautiful fills, an octave apart from the rest of the band. The sound of their brassy instruments called up images of hot, sweaty nights down in the Big Easy. Nights filled with beer and blues and passionate women—women who might pull you into a hot kiss or punch you in the teeth depending on the song and the mood. The bass was a slow steady pulse, the throb of the band’s heart, while a rhythm guitar strummed on the off beats.

  The sound was hypnotic.

  A pair of women began to sing, words meandering from English to Creole to straight French, then back again, and grotesque images of murder and death exploded in my head: bodies butchered, prepared, and thrown into yawning graves.

  Between the club’s owner, the strange music, and the flamboyantly morbid graffiti, it took me only a second to figure out that this place wasn’t just a nightclub. It was a death cult, and I had no doubt who this cult worshiped and revered: Baron Samedi, the Haitian god of the grave, and the Fourth Seal Bearer. Ong, the Naga King we’d come to find. Could it be I was on my way to meet the man himself? Only time would tell, I suppose.

  My coffin lurched and swayed as we moved, passing from the huge dance floor and into a connecting room full of curling strands of sweet tobacco smoke and pungent weed. More Haitians, many wearing fine-cut suits or beautiful slinky cocktail dresses, lounged around low, dark wood tables sporting sprawling, elaborate hookahs. There were dancers here, too, but these were of the exotic variety—men and women twining their way around strip poles, positioned on raised platforms scattered throughout the room.

  Except, on closer inspection, I realized just how exotic these dancers were.

  They were, I shit you not, zombies. All recently deceased, sure, but there was no mistaking the glazed eyes or the pale, washed-out look to their skin. Out of the corner of my frozen eye, I saw one of the dancers—a mocha-skinned woman in slinky red lingerie, frilly and extremely sheer—spin once, twice, a third time, then peel off her clothes. But the strip show didn’t end there, which would’ve been more than disturbing enough on its own.

  Nope, instead of simply removing her barely there garments, the zombified stripper started ripping away swatches of skin, revealing slick pink muscle and gleaming white bone beneath. And the living onlookers, crowding around the low tables, watched raptly. They sipped drinks or puffed away at snaking hookah hoses; many leaned forward, arms resting on legs as hungry eyes devoured the revolting scene. Had I not been entirely paralyzed and basically dead, I totally would’ve thrown up everything I’d ever eaten in my entire life.

  Oh yeah. Definitely a death cult. If there had been any doubt in my mind before, there was none now.

  We didn’t stay in the room for long—a small victory—instead we passed by a long bar, before hooking right and pushing through a swinging door with an “Employees Only” sign, written in both English and French. An expansive kitchen, remarkably updated and clean considering the rest of the building, jutted off to the right. My pallbearers, however, continued straight as an arrow, shoving past another heavy door, this one unremarkable and unmarked, which led to a set of descending, decrepit stone stairs. I’d been in enough French colonials during my days in the Big Easy to know this staircase would connect to the raised basement.

  I’ve also been doing this kinda thing long enough to know that the basement in the bad-guy lair is just about the last place in the world you want to end up. Especially if you’ve been taken prisoner. And especially, especially if the bad guy in question is a murderous necroma
ncer with a personal blood vendetta against you. In my experience, the basement is always where they do the messy, unpleasant stuff.

  Like Saw-movie torture and ritual murder.

  It didn’t take long before the pallbearers carried me into a bleak room made of old brick and lit with harsh fluorescent overheads. Carefully, my escorts set the coffin on the ground, then, without so much as a word between them, dug hands and fingers beneath my arms and legs and hoisted me out of the box. They dropped me onto a steel surgical gurney, the metal cool beneath my paralyzed palms. Next to me—because my life is the equivalent of campy horror-comedy—sat a wooden shelf overflowing with all of the most horrifying torture implements on the planet:

  A hacksaw and a ball-peen hammer.

  An assortment of rust covered nails.

  Pliers, pruning shears, scalpels, and power drills.

  Rolls of catgut sutures, duct tape—even evil Voodoo Kings can find a use for duct tape, I guess—and wicked curved needles.

  My eyes were still open, and though I couldn’t look at Beauvoir directly, he was impossible to miss in my peripheries. He lingered by the wooden shelf beside me, his lanky fingers carefully picking over the tools of his trade, brushing each implement in turn before finally stopping on a plain utility knife with a triangular chunk of razor blade poking out from a cheap plastic handle. Tool in hand, he slid over until his lanky form loomed above me, his grinning face filling up my entire field of vision. From this close, I could see the yawning hole in his mug, which he didn’t bother to cover, crisscrossed by a trio of thick scars.

  Looked like a grizzly bear had mauled his face.

  The bullet wound, exactly where his left eye should’ve been, stretched all the way to the back of his head, letting through a weak trickle of light. The damned hole went clean through. I don’t know what power had brought him back from the grave, but looking at that wound, I knew there was no way Beauvoir was alive. Sure, he seemed lively enough—he was walking, talking, and running a friggin’ nightclub—but the guy was missing part of his brainstem.