Cold Hearted: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode Two) (17 page)

“I’ve got a theory, but that’s all,” he said. “I think—and I could be wrong here—but I think that when a metus transforms it
literally
becomes whatever it transforms into. If they take on the form of a vampire, they temporally become a vampire. At least until they take on a new form. That kind of thing. So maybe, while transformed, they’ll have whatever weakness that particular thing has. That’s all I got.”

“Hum.” I pressed my lips together. “Not as helpful as I was hoping for.”

He shrugged. “Take it or leave it. I’ve got to go—I can barely hold myself together …” His limbs were drooping, fat drops of pink falling away. “Friggin’ poison. Get this shit ironed out,” he admonished again before falling into a puddle.

“Well … that was something, all right.” Ferraro said.

“Yeah,” I said noncommittally, still focused on my task—I wasn’t quite done, not yet. I carefully set the knife down and picked up the medical vial, holding it below my slashed palm before squeezing blood from the wound, drawing the red liquid down into the tube.

“What are you doing now?” Ferraro asked, weariness coating the words. Obviously I still hadn’t earned her trust completely.

“Don’t worry about it. Just magic stuff, not any of your concern.” The way I figured it, if I made it through this mess, managed to get the Holy Grail, and put Shelton down, it’d be good to see if I couldn’t whip up some kind of antidote against the toxin. Probably I’d never be dosed with that kind of poison again, but with my luck, I wouldn’t completely count it out either. After a few minutes, the vial was nearly full, so I carefully stoppered it with the plastic cap and stowed it away in a small built-in fridge for later.

“Hey, help me patch this up,” I said, holding out my bleeding palm to Ferraro. “The first aid kit is on that shelf over there.” She grabbed the kit and set about pulling out gauze, scissors, and paper tape.

Harvey shook his head. “I don’t even know what to think,” he said. “I just … I can’t get my head ‘round this.”

“Listen Harvey,” I replied, “this shit’s tough for the mortal mind to process—you’ve got a crash course here, but there’s still a good chance that your mind will reject this whole experience. In a week or a month or a year, you might just be able to convince yourself that it was a bad dream. Everything will blur around the edges, fade with time. The human brain isn’t really equipped to handle the truth, not this truth anyway.”

“I just don’t know.” He looked down at the camper floor.

“Look, most of the monsters try to keep things under wraps—at least marginally—but even if they were walking around in broad daylight, most people wouldn’t really see ‘em. They’d think it was a joke. A guy in a costume, maybe. Most people only see what they want to see, and they’ll go to extreme lengths to explain away the obvious. So don’t feel bad, what you’re going through is normal—don’t sweat the details.”

He glanced up and placed his hands on either side of his head, like maybe he was trying to keep the crazy in. “And if I don’t forget? What do I do then?”

“If you don’t forget?” I shrugged. “Start drinking. Whatever you do though, don’t tell anyone, ever. If you do, your family and friends will disown you, think you’re on drugs, or maybe decide you’ve slipped a cog in the old mental machine. So just bottle it up and keep it inside. If you really need someone to talk to, I can put you in touch with some people who can sympathize.” I’d give him Greg’s number—an old bud from my Vietnam days, who actively hunted all the freaky-deaky hoodoo that preyed on folks.

“So this creature,” Ferraro said, while taping the last bit of gauze into place. “It can shape shift into anything?”

“Yeah, sort of. It can take any shape, but it can only take a single form at a time. Usually, it’ll assume the most horrific fear of the first person to spot it. That’s what everyone else will see, until it locks on to a new target.”

“So because I saw it first, it turned into my Nonna … but how did it know what to say, about L’uomo Nero? About all of that?”

“They can peer into your mind,” I said, “peer into the part of your brain where terror lurks, and see the memories tied to the particular fear. It can make itself into exactly what your mind finds most disturbing, and create it. But we can use that. We can use this thing’s power against it … Ferraro, tell me again what Adams thought he saw.”

“I’ll do you one better.” She pulled the radio from her belt and thumbed the button on the side. “Adams, this is Ferraro, over.”

“Go for Adams, over,” a male voice squawked from the radio.

“Tell me what you saw again, over.”

Silence for a moment, as though the guy were trying to decide how to phrase it in the least bat-shit crazy way possible. “It looked like a werewolf. Brown fur, long muzzle, sharp teeth, big yella eyes. Except it wore a clown suit—baggy yella-and-red outfit with multicolored puffballs runnin’ right up the middle. Big oversized shoes, though he had a mean set of claws.”

I reached out for the radio, and Ferraro reluctantly gave it over. “A werewolf, you sure, over?” I asked.

“Yep, I’m sure. I’ve been scared of werewolves since I was a kid—I know what a werewolf looks like. It was a werewolf—err, except for the clown suit, of course. Over.”

“Out,” I said, ending the radio communication.

“Yeah, finally a good hand to work with,” I said, smiling for the first time in a while. Since checking up on Kozlov, I’d been having a pretty shitty go of things: no power, arrested, pressed into the service of Lady Luck, and stuck battling a shape-shifting fear-monster. But now I had a plan. Sometimes, even without power, you can still outthink even the most dangerous opponents. I opened up one of the small drawers underneath my bed and took out a few necessary items, a couple of Vis imbued doodads that might just give us a fighting chance against this Friday Night Creature Feature.

“Alright,” I said, looking first at Ferraro, then at Harvey. “So listen up and pay attention. This might get a little hairy, but I think we can shut this shit-licking, pig-face-wearing, clown-wolf down for keeps.”

SIXTEEN:

Time to Tango

I was standing in the chilly, snow-filled room where I’d tangoed with the Butcher earlier in the evening. The door to the hallway—where Ferraro’s Nonna had appeared—was behind me, firmly shut though not locked. That was my exit route, the way back to the interrogation room where I’d finish off this shape-shifting bastard. Assuming, of course, I actually managed to make it back to the interrogation room.

Right now I was putting fifty-fifty odds on that. I wasn’t handcuffed, awesome, and I had some of my gear back: my coat, pistol, and a Vis embedded K-bar—old-school Marine Corps-issued knife, with a black blade and a round wooden handle. I even had a twelve-gauge, eight-shot Mossberg, courtesy of the police department.

I didn’t have my powers though, and I couldn’t actually use my pistol, not yet—I needed to save that for the final act of this drama. I also didn’t have any help.

Everyone was locked up nice and tight in the observation room, which looked into the interrogation room via the one-way mirror, Ferraro included—though damn if that hadn’t been one helluva fight. I’d grabbed a bunch of barrier sticky notes from the El-Camino, yes, sticky notes. These were little blue ones with a variety of seals covering the front and back; they were rudimentary wards that made it more difficult for supernatural beings to pass by.

If the metus really wanted to get into the room housing the officers, it probably could with some time and effort. I was sure, however, that it wouldn’t be too interested in them. After all, I was its primary target and I was standing out in a big, poorly lit room all by my lonesome. Powerless. If the metus was smarter than a brain-dead amoeba—and I had no reason to believe otherwise—it’d know this was the best chance to rip my limbs off, drink my blood, and wear my skin like a Batman cape.

Though I had a plan going into this little throw down, there was a damn good chance that Fear-Factor was gonna punch my ticket. But sometimes them’s the breaks. Just gotta roll the dice and see whether you come up elevens or snake eyes.

“Alright, ass-pirate,” I called out to the empty room. “I know you’re lurking around here somewhere, biding your time … but here I am, so if you want a piece of me … well, this is your shot. I’m tired of you taking pokes at a bunch of innocent Rubes, so let’s just do this dance, dickweed.” No better way to piss off a bully who wants you to be afraid than by choosing to be brave. And yes, sometimes calling bullies silly names is brave.

I shuffled around the room a little, shotgun tucked into my shoulder pocket, the moonlight playing off its black barrel. “
Ba-cock
,” I shouted, flapping my arms up and down, the best chicken impersonation I could manage while holding a shottie. “Someone a wittle scared? Maybe you’re just some kind of spineless, chicken-shit huckster, only taking a chance when you think you’ve got a sure thing.
Ba-cock, Ba-cock
.”

Click-click-click
, the sound came from the far wall—near the window and the stairwell entrance—from the deep shadows in the far corner, maybe thirty or forty feet away.

I love it when a plan comes together.

A rustle of movement, and then something seemed to materialize out of the dark. Inky blackness giving birth to life and horror. Except the thing that stepped out wasn’t some freaky-deaky monster-movie baddie, nor was it some repressed childhood fear. It was just … me. A mirror image, at least from the waist up—everything below was wrapped up nice and tight in a cloak of black.

“I think you’re the one who’s a wittle scared,” it said with my voice. “Scared of yourself. Of all the terrible things you’ve done. The people you’ve hurt—everyone who gets close to you pays the price. Lauren. Your kids. Ailia. Your friends. You’re a menace. A danger. A plague. You hide behind tough words and snarky comments … but underneath? A damaged, broken little boy, too scared to look in the mirror.” He smiled, a flash of its teeth—my teeth—and scuttled further into the wane light of the room.

The shadows around his waist receded, melted away as he drew closer. Oh God, his bottom half was the chitinous form of a centipede—a long segmented body of rusty-red snaked out into the darkness. Legs, hundreds of white, vaguely luminescent, prong-like appendages clicked against the tiled floor, and rubbed against one another. Slick, bobbing antenna burst through my doppelganger’s forehead, the skin cracking and rupturing with gouts of blood. His lips peeled back and giant mandibles worked their way free, snapping back and forth in angry chewing motions.

So yeah, I was afraid of myself, sure, but centipedes won that race hands down, with no runner up even close to the finish line. But if my two greatest fears had a baby? This would be that thing … the attack of Centi-Me. And yes, it scared the great good bejesus outta me. I backed up a step, not wanting to be within touching distance of that thing. My knees wobbled just a little, my hands quivered, refusing to hold the gun barrel steady. Shit, shit, shit, it’s all fun and games until you’re alone in a dark room with a manipede.

I didn’t have time for fear, though, this wasn’t the place to let myself be scared. No, this was the time for action, brainless heroics, and adrenaline. Lots of adrenaline. I could have nightmares later—I was sure I would—but for now, it was time to put this bad dream to rest. So I focused. It was harder without the Vis pumping through my veins, lending me power and, in turn, courage. But I focused nonetheless.

“Good,” it hissed through its mandibles in a voice that no longer resembled my own. “I can taste your fear,” it moaned in delight, “so rich, so full of power. I can’t wait to eat you.”

“Eat this,”—I know it’s terribly cliché, but hey, how often do you get a straight line like that?—I leveled the shotgun and worked the trigger with one hand and the pump with the other,
boom
-
boom-boom-boom
. Take that Centi-Me, and take that fear. Sometimes the only way to get over your worst fears is to face them head on and then pump ‘em full of lead with a friggin’ shotgun.

The sound of the shottie was deafening, the muzzle flashes painting the room with short-lived light and flickering shadows. I wasn’t firing buckshot either, these were big slugs, and they tore away great chunks of meat and exoskeleton in their passing. Centi-Me hissed and shrieked, rolling forward with a liquid, insect grace: weaving around fallen junk, surging over a downed chair, legs clicking along the floor.

I backpedaled, feeding more cartridges into the chamber—I managed to get four loaded before my back pressed up against the wall. Centi-Me was almost within striking distance, so I went to town with what I had to work with. I fired my remaining cartridges, and then ditched the shotgun, drawing my K-Bar from the sheath on my belt and fishing out a tiny glass bauble—a little smaller than a tennis ball—from my coat pocket. The orb glowed with a soft light, full of shifting hues—from ruby-red to jade. I guess it kinda looked like a Christmas ornament, the kind that has the lights inside.

It was a premade Vis hand grenade. I’d only had the one in the Camino, a leftover from some past job, but it turned out to be a pretty lucky find considering the circumstances. Stupid Fortuna … One trinket sure wasn’t enough to get her off the hook. I mean, why couldn’t I look in the Camino and suddenly discover I had the Magical Sword of Metus Death—and no, that’s not a real thing. But boy would it be lucky if it were. I had one measly grenade and I only had one chance with it, so I had to make it count, plus I had no illusion that it would actually kill the baddie. Hopefully, though, it’d hurt that son of a bitch something fierce.

Centi-Me raised one of its hands, its previously human fingers replaced by long white claws, similar to its scuttling legs. Though the beastie was still ten feet away, it lashed out, a lightning strike—the blow fell well short, but its spiked fingers detached with a
snap
and hurtled through the air, five deadly spears of bone aimed at yours truly. I ducked and dove behind a nearby overturned desk. The spikes collided
into the wall where I’d been standing, though one of the little things thudded into the desk and drove nearly the whole way through.