Cold Hearted: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode Two) (19 page)

The silver rounds burst through the glass in a cacophony of sound—glass falling in sheets—and tore into the world’s least funny clown like a pack of junkyard dogs. A pair of rounds punched solidly into its chest, another took it in the gut, and the fourth sunk deep into one of its arms. Odd blood, nearly purple and twisted with swirls of black, oozed free of the wounds.

The creature looked hate and daggers at me, its body began to twist and change, to transform back into my fear … but then, distorted flesh snapped back into place. Now rigid and fixed. The silver bullets were working, were killing the son of a bitch, locking its werewolf form in place. More blood splattered free. A swollen tongue—turning from pink to black—emerged from its jaws, its eyes swelled in its head. One claw tipped paw went to its throat, the other reached for me.

Score one for allergies.

The metus was at death’s door and it knew it … with the last of its strength and will, it bolted around the table and hurtled through the remaining glass.

I unleashed my last two rounds—another gut shot, and one that grazed its neck. The creature rocked back from the impact but didn’t stop.

Don’t look at me that way, I know a head shot would’ve been better, but listen, shooting in a stressful situation isn’t easy, okay. And when that stressful situation happens to involve a rampaging werewolf who looks like a member of Cirque du Soleil, multiply that stress factor by about a thousand. Plus, I usually have the Vis running through my system, which allows me to bind with the gun in such a way as to grant me far greater accuracy. Considering the circumstances, I think I did pretty damn good.

Just not good enough to keep Wolfie from colliding into me and ramming black-tipped claws into my exposed gut. I went to the ground, hard, the metus on top of me, gaping mouth a foot or two from my neck, my face. The scent of its reeking breath, like old dead meat, filled my nostrils. My guts filled with liquid fire—the beasts nails gouging into me like a set of hot steak knives passing through butter.

The bark of gunfire, and the creature fell away, tumbling into the conference table behind it. Angry purple wounds dotted its face and neck. It looked on for a few seconds more before finally pitching over to the side, its body swollen and still at last. A handful of seconds later, the body started to melt: fur, claw, tooth, clown costume dissolving down into a puddle of green Jell-O, not that you’d want to eat what was left of the metus. In another hour or two, even the goo would be gone, leaving behind nothing by way of physical evidence that the metus had ever been here. Save, of course, for the carnage and corpses.

Boy were Ferraro and the officers gonna have a helluva time writing this up in a report. Even if they had video footage—doubtful considering the blackout—it’d still be a tough sell. No police chief in their right mind would sign off on the “shape shifter did it” explanation. Talk about career suicide.

Hopefully I wouldn’t end up taking the fall, though it had been an especially unlucky couple of days for me, so I wouldn’t hold my breath. Shit, I couldn’t hold my breath even if I wanted to; my guts hurt too much for it.

Ferraro rushed over to me, holstered her weapon, and took a knee by my side. “Bet you’re glad I decided to hang around after all,” she said with a tight smile as she began to peel my shirt up to check the gut wounds.

“I’d have figured something out.” I said, wincing as her finger probed four messy wounds. “Besides, who needs their guts anyway?” I coughed, which hurt like a bitch. “I hear there’s like thirty feet of intestine in there—seems a little excessive, I could probably live without a couple of feet, give or take.”

“Shut up, idiot,” she said. More probing. I tried not to groan and give away how much her doctoring hurt. Plus—as I’ve previously mentioned—she was pretty good looking, and generally, squealing like a piglet isn’t the manliest way to impress a woman. So I just tried to clamp my teeth closed and endure it. But boy did I want to squeal. Stupid, manly pride.

“I’ll need to stitch these up, but I don’t think the injuries are life threatening. The punctures are messy, but not very deep—I don’t think the creature managed to perforate the abdomen wall.”

“Thank you, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, for your highly professional assessment, but it seems like a hospital would probably be a safer route.”

“No hospital,” she said. “You are escaping.”

“Come again now?” I asked, thinking I’d surely misheard her.

“I said, you’re
escaping
. And I’m coming with you.” She took a long pause, looking down as though she wasn’t sure she could meet my eyes. Finally she looked up. “Maybe I was wrong about you—after tonight … well, maybe I was wrong. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a killer out there. You said someone sent this thing—the same someone who killed Kozlov. That means I have a murderer responsible for at least three deaths, two of them cops. I want to make sure this guy gets justice. And I need you to do that … so, you’re going to escape. And I’m going to follow you.”

Damn, I hadn’t seen that one coming. Normally, the idea of taking some almost-Rube on a hunt for a dark mage, channeling a semi-immortal Lich, wouldn’t seem like a great idea. But Ferraro was pretty badass and seemed handy as hell in a tight corner. And without my powers? I needed all the help I could get.

“Alright.” I smiled. “Let’s go nab us a bad guy—but you better buckle up lady, ‘cause you’re in for one bumpy ride. Before we can get this perp, I’m gonna have to track down the gen-u-ine Holy Grail, and I got a bad feeling that we’re gonna have to go into the backwaters of Outworld to get it. So get your game face on.”

She grinned; it was not a nice smile. Check, game face on. Time to get the show on the road.

EIGHTEEN:

Train to Outworld

“I can’t believe this place—can’t believe this has been right under my nose for so long, and I never saw. Never knew,” Ferraro said from the train seat across from mine. The FBI agent, and my former enemy, was on sabbatical leave after the crazy-ass goings-on that had taken place in a police station a few days back. The two-week sabbatical hadn’t entirely been her idea, but she’d seemed happy enough since it allowed her to help me track down the actual shithead responsible for the whole fiasco.

To be honest, I was happy too—I had someone to help me out in a tight spot and that someone also happened to be a good-looking, highly competent woman. So win-win for me.

I watched her for a moment—at just shy of six foot, she was a tall woman with short black hair, strong features, and darkly tanned skin. She looked scruffier now than before: dirty rumpled cargo pants, white undershirt with a red plaid shirt over the top. She glanced at me before looking back out the window—watching the Hub trickle past, rubbing at the bridge of her nose with one hand.

The muddy brown sky peeked down on a strange city filled with jagged buildings of every shape and size, made from almost every imaginable material. Blood-red brick places with lurid women dancing in the windows. Towering apartment complexes of pitted concrete painted in shades both too loud and too strange—glowing-yellow here, sewer-shit-green there.

Thick swathes of power lines snaked overhead, frantic things running from everywhere to everywhere with no sense of order or even purpose. And above those, the Royal Helicutter ran on a massive set of tracks—larger than the roadway proper—hanging high in the air, supported by huge metal columns jutting at intervals from the sidewalk. The whole scene looked dirty, sleazy—garbage everywhere, grime coating every surface, gaudy neon lighting advertising everything. Women, men, sex, pain, drugs, secret knowledge. Everything could be had here.

We were on the ground train, chugging along for the Hinterlands.

Outside our train window a Victorian-era carriage—pulled along by a zombified horse with greenish flesh, a wispy mane, and gobs of meat missing—trotted by in the opposite direction. The driver, a rail-thin man in black wearing a top hat, flashed us a grin and a wink, as though he were privy to some inside secret. Shit, here he might’ve been.

On the left sprawled a strangely lopsided building of lime-green stone sporting thick power cables, towering antennas, and high-tech steel-shuttered windows and doors. “What the hell is that?” She jabbed her finger.

“The Cult of Akroid,” I said, wanting the ride to be over, and knowing it wouldn’t be for a good long while yet. She was new to all this, so her curiosity, excitement even, was entirely understandable, completely justifiable, but utterly
exhausting.
“One of their operation facilities, anyways. Technomancers and plastic surgeons. Offer people high-tech body upgrades, mechanical retrofits, that kind of thing.”

Once we passed the edge of the Hub, metal curtains would close over the train’s windows, affording me a break from her intense questioning. She was an intense kind of woman, which was fine in small doses.

“Unbelievable.” She shook her head. “And those things?” She gestured to a pair of men, each with fat, bulbous bodies, no legs, and disproportionately large arms and hands, which they used for walking.

“I dunno.” I shrugged. “Don’t look like pure-blood anythings—so probably just halfies of one variety or another?”

“Halfies?” She arched an eyebrow at me.

“Yeah, halfies. Sometimes things from the Hub will go to Earth—Inworld—and reproduce. The babies that come out are different—not entire one or the other. Halfies. Look, there are a gajillion things here … just try to enjoy the ride, huh?”

“I can’t.” She was practically bouncing in her seat with pent-up energy. “This is too much. It’s crazy—how is it possible that this has remained hidden?”

I shrugged again. “People see what they want to see, and ignore everything else, I guess. In the West, we believe in science, we believe in the rational—and this”—I flashed a hand across the window—“is not rational, this is not science. So people make excuses not to believe. But yeah, you’re right, shit’s crazier than a friggin’ psych ward.”

And it was. I’ve been living as a mage for years, but I started out as a dumb Rube, and sometimes I still found it hard to believe and I’d had years to adjust. But Nicole? Why, a mere two days ago, she’d been holding me in custody on a series of grisly murder charges, completely oblivious to the supernatural world. And today? Today she was sitting across from me in a private train compartment, zipping through the sprawling supernatural city called the Hub, en route to one of the most dangerous parts of Outworld.

The fact that she was accompanying me as an ally instead of as an arresting agent was almost as crazy in its own way. Personally, I just never would’ve seen that one happening. Guess it all goes to show that sometimes life has a way of getting complicated, getting away from you, and leading you in some very unexpected directions.

“Tell me more about where we’re going, again. I want to be ready.” She ran a hand over the Glock at her hip, the motion one of instinct, maybe comfort.

“Fine, then a little quiet, okay?”

“You are a wanted fugitive,” she said, her tone saying no nonsense would be tolerated. “You’re free because I’m allowing it, so I expect full cooperation, Mr. Lazarus.”

I ground my teeth in frustration. Even though I did my time with the Marines, I’ve never been great with authority. “Fine. Cooperation. The Hinterlands is outside the Hub, but not technically a true part of Outworld. It’s kind of a wasteland, sort of a crazy version of the Old West—except with monsters, demons, post-apocalyptic cities, and nuclear fallout. It’s bad, dangerous, yada, yada, yada. Keep your head on a swivel, so on and so forth, and all that jazz. We’ll meet my contact in a bar called the Hog’s Head. Happy?”

“Not even remotely,” she said, staring back out the window, but saying nothing more.

I don’t know if she slept or not—if I were in her shoes, I’m not sure I could’ve—but I dozed on and off for the next couple of hours.

When I woke, Ferraro was awake, alert, nursing one of those tasteless energy bars health nuts go for. She’d ask me a question or two, I’d respond with all the enthusiasm of a dental patient about to receive a root canal, and then I’d drift back off again. One lesson I’ve learned in my days on the road is this: take sleep when you can get it, especially if there’s a pile of shit and a fan close by. You just never know when you’ll get another chance, and being well rested can make the difference between life and death.

We traveled that way for maybe seven hours, give or take; time can be a little wonky in Outworld—trains will often pass through drifting time pockets, which could either slow things down or speed ‘em up. I didn’t give it much mind. I was still worn out from my scrap with the metus and, because of no-good Randy, I didn’t have access to the normal strength and fortitude the Vis leant me.

So yeah, I slept. As well and deeply as I could, considering I only had a hard little bench to curl up on.

After a good couple of hours, Ferraro nudged me awake with the toe of her boot. I cracked an eye from my place on the bench, and stifled a yawn. Outside the window, a dusty town—made of equal parts wood, concrete, and steel—stretched away into the distance. Gusts of dirty wind swept through the town, revealing buildings for a moment and then swallowing them in a cloud of brown. Men and women, human-looking and not, trudged about the street—heads down, eyes often hidden behind brass and leather-trimmed goggles, while sleek ventilation masks covered noses and mouths. The sun hung low over the horizon—maybe an hour or two until the sun set for the night—casting lurid red light along the streets.

Bradshaw Landing: one of only a few thriving, semi-civilized cities in all of the Hinterlands.

“This us?” Ferraro asked, simultaneously slipping on a tan, military-grade backpack. She rooted around in her cargo pocket for a minute, not waiting for my reply, and fished out a pair of goggles and a mask of her own, which she promptly donned.

“Yeah, this is our stop. Hurray.” I sat up and stretched out cramped back muscles—should’ve paid for the upgrade; first-class had genuine beds to sleep on. It wouldn’t have fit with our cover story, though: just a couple of world-weary, and mostly human—definitely
not
mage—travelers. Still, my back was not happy about our cover story.