Strange Magic: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (13 page)

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.

I lay unmoving, not wanting to open my eyes, not wanting to remember where I was or how I’d gotten there.

I just wanted to be still, to let my weary body take its ease, to imagine I was safe and everything was okay. Maybe I was with a beautiful woman.

Maybe Rosie—the long-legged, funny-as-hell brunette from Kansas I’d hooked up with a couple months back. Yeah, maybe Rosie had once again welcomed me into her apartment and in between her bedsheets. It hadn’t been serious. I don’t do serious and she’d known it, but it had been good. I’d been safe there, warm in her queen-sized bed, cotton sheets entwined around my body. She bought me donuts and coffee from the Krispy-Kreme the next morning.

God, how I wanted that to be my reality.

It wasn’t and I knew it.

I couldn’t remember what’d happened, but I wasn’t with Rosie. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, literally, and to hell with the cliché. Though I wanted to indulge my fiction, I was sure there were more pressing concerns to deal with. I blinked my eyes open. The lighting in the room was harsh—felt like staring into the sun on a cloudless day.

“I think he’s coming t …” said the soothing female voice, “it looks … starting to open … eyes.” I only caught snatches of her words, the syllables blurry and indistinct. So was her form, though it definitely wasn’t Rosie. Rosie was brunette and this lady was blond, almost platinum.

“Good,” said a gruff, recognizable voice followed by footsteps. A man came into view: Morse. That asshole.

Oh right. I was in LA. The Saints of Chaos. Yraeta and the Kings. The Daitya …

I must’ve passed out after my fight with the demon. Drawing too deeply from the Vis can do some funky stuff to the mind and body. I had, in the way of the Vis, just finished running an Ironman Triathlon—you know, those insane things where people swim for a couple of miles, bike for like a hundred more, and then run a friggin’ marathon, all without a break? Athletes who participate in such events routinely suffer from serious physical injuries and what I’d done while fighting the Daitya had been of a similar magnitude, even though our royal rumble had taken no more than ten minutes.

Morse stood over me smiling. I was on the same banquet table from earlier. This was an all too familiar tableau … at least I wasn’t Saran-wrapped down this time around.

“I’ve got to stop waking up like this.” I propped myself into a sitting position, legs dangling down—the motion sent a wave of dizziness coursing through my head, threatening to lay me back out.

“My gamble paid off. Fuck, you’re better than a room full of machine guns,” Morse said, a large toothy grin cut his face in half. It was a genuinely happy smile, one that reached all the way to his eyes. He lifted a half-full glass of something amber and delicious looking, and offered a toast. “You smoked the shit out of that thing. Six shots right to the fuckin’ head—fuckin’ A, dead as dead. To Yancy Lazarus.” In that moment any bitterness or animosity I harbored against Morse melted away, a snow bank too long exposed to the glow of the sun. He cared about his people, cared about their well-being, their families, their livelihood and lives.

Morse was a predator, a jackal who’d gladly rip your throat out, but he was also more. The people in this home were jackals of a similar nature, but they were his pack and his fierce love for them was obvious.

He thought I’d killed the Daitya—understandable from his perspective, like he said, I’d shot the thing six times in the head—and I hated to disappoint him. Nothing to be done about that though.

“Not dead,” I said. The cheerful buzz of celebration, filling the room with its optimism, died into an uneasy whisper.

“What?” Morse asked, his smile gone as quickly as it had come.

“Not dead. Temporarily out of commission.”

“Bullshit. I saw what happened, you blasted that fucker back into the Stone Age with that hand cannon.” His shoulders were unconsciously raised, tension knotting his muscles.

He wanted to believe the Daitya was gone and this nightmare was over. It was obvious he couldn’t bear the thought of facing this tribulation again. His eyes held the same wild look I’d seen a hundred times before. In Vietnam, lots of guys would get that same look after a firefight, especially if it was the first, and especially if they had to go back outside the wire: fear mingling with anxiety, resolve waltzing with cowardice, self-preservation arm wrestling with duty. It was the look of a gambler counting odds,
how long would the dice come up 7s
?

“No bullshit, Morse. All I did was buy us some time—a week, to get this situation straightened out, or we’ll be facing round two. And next time, the demon is going to be expecting an ambush. We won’t get so lucky again.”

The glass, raised to me in salutation a moment ago, flew from Morse’s hand. The
tinkle
of broken glass resounded in the room.

“Fuck!” He bellowed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He stomped over to the living room wall and sunk his fist deep into the drywall with a
thunk
.

“Listen Morse, it’s not too late to fix things. We can prevent this asshole demon from manifesting again.” The room was utterly still. The fuming Morse withdrew his hand from the wall and stood stock still, a feisty wolverine waiting for something to maul—an animal backed into a corner. A few chunks of drywall crumbled to the carpet.

“Alright. Alright,” he finally said, reigning in his temper. “You said it’s temporarily out of commission. What the fuck does that mean?”

“Creatures like that are conjured here from a different plane, but they don’t actually belong to our reality—they’re just visiting. Think about it like this: you can’t waltz out onto the highway without getting smashed into little pieces, you need a car. Well, a creature like that demon can’t just walk around in our reality. It needs a particular construct, a vehicle, to operate. The Conjurer pumps a ton of energy into a construct—what you might think of as a magic spell—in order to provide the being with a body to move around in. All I did tonight was rob the demon of enough energy that it was no longer able to maintain its physical presence in our reality. Basically, I busted its car to shit.”

“So what … next week the Conjurer dickhead that called this thing just repairs the car?” Morse asked.

“Yahtzee.”

“Everybody out of the room … Now.” Morse commanded, swiveling about to make sure all of his underlings got an equal piece of his glare. His voice was not loud, but it demanded obedience, and the fistful of men and women in the room were more than happy to oblige. Each, in turn, slinked away like a dog caught picking through the trash, until only Morse and I remained. Morse pulled out an I-phone, thumbed through its contents for a moment, and then showed me the screen.

A little boy, maybe nine, with red hair and a dusting of freckles, clung to a thirty-something-woman with striking red hair and a low cut blouse of burgundy. The mother had her arms entwined around the little boy. Both were smiling—maybe laughing—while they peered into the camera. It wasn’t a professionally done photo, just a phone picture. The quality of the photo was poor, yet its authenticity made it more powerful. It reminded me of my youngest son when he had been that age.

With a flick of his thumb, Morse brought another picture onto the screen: a selfie of a gruff man in his fifties with a spattering of scars and small tattoos across his face and around his neck. The woman next to him was maybe forty, with too tan skin and too blond hair. They were at a bar, the fuzzy shape of a pool table and the glare of neon lights told the story. The pair would have blended in at the Sturgis rally without remark; both bikers and both, obviously, happy. The way their faces pressed together, the way her eyes looked up toward his—they were in love.

Morse showed me another three pictures: two couples—one old, one young—and a father cuddling a small girl.

“Why are you showing me these?” I asked.

“These are the people the demon’s already killed—these are my brothers and sisters, and children. You met Uncle Frank right?”

I nodded.

“The older guy with the platinum blonde. That’s was our Sergeant at Arms, foundering member of the Charter. Uncle Frank’s older brother with his wife. Dead two weeks now, flayed alive …”

“You’ve got to help me.” His voice broke a little. “I can’t see any more of my people hurt. And the kids … I don’t want to see another kid fuckin’ die.”

His words hit a nerve somewhere deep inside of me, something hot burned in my guts and blood. I wanted to eviscerate the guy who’d conjured the fucking Daitya. Wanted to smash his face in with a rock, to bludgeon him until his head caved and his eyes didn’t work anymore. I wanted to set him ablaze and watch his skin slough off for hurting those kids. The sensation was a nauseating visceral thing and it made me sick. I’m no stranger to violence but I’ve never
wanted
to hurt someone—not like this. Maybe in Nam, but Nam had been a long time ago.

“Please help me,” Morse said again, his eyes downcast at the carpet.

“Okay.”

He seemed to relax with my answer. “I’m gonna need to track down the Conjurer, and I’ll need some help from you and your guys to kill this dickhead.”