Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (30 page)

Beauvoir set down the lighter with a metallic
clack
, then leaned into me, slowly lowering the metal scoop toward my face, a centimeter at a time. Lowering it down and down, until I could feel the glowing heat on my skin.

Ferraro will come through, she’ll save me, she has to—

The world erupted in a pain so intense, so excruciating, there were no words for it. No metaphor capable of relating the hurt. It was all fire and death and hell, as half the world went dark, blinking out like a burst lightbulb. Somehow, amazingly, I forced out a single word, despite the zombie powder lingering in my system.

“FUUUUUUUUUCK!”
Just one long, low groan.

Beauvoir pulled the melon baller away, the silver metal tarnished with red.

A second later the table beneath me shook and trembled.

For a heartbeat I thought it was just me—some strange new sensation riding the crashing waves of brutal pain—but then the torture implements next to me rattled, the
click-clack
of metal on metal. Felt like a small earthquake, but a
whomp
, far off in the distance—partially muted by the thick walls—said otherwise. Even zombified, half dead, and down one eye, I knew that sound: an explosion. Good-sized one, too.

The cavalry was on the way. That had to be it.

Except it was hard to care, hard to care if I lived or died. The pain was so awful, death seemed like the better option.

Heavy footfalls followed a moment later—

Someone descending the stairs from above.

“Baron,” came a frantic voice, liberally coated with French. “There been an attack. A bomb out front, at the police station. Zombie pieces are everywhere. And someone out there be using magic. Powerful magic. People are runnin’. It’s bad.”

Beauvoir set the melon baller down, his face contorted in a grimace of rage and hate. “What?” he asked, a growl of disapproval.

“An attack, Baron.”

Beauvoir’s spidery fingers curled into tight fists as he regarded me lying still once more. “Get this place on lockdown,” he said finally. “Marshall da troops, prepare for a counterassault. Now.” He turned toward the pallbearers—who I assumed were still present even if I couldn’t see them—and barked something harsh in French, then rounded on me. “We aren’t finished,” he snapped, rising to his feet. There was a flutter of movement as he spun then disappeared, followed by the angry
clomp
of feet storming upstairs.

Sterilize the wound.
Azazel’s voice floated up from deep within me, a faint whisper, but present. Somehow, strange as it may sound, hearing that monster was a comfort. It meant I wasn’t alone. And, more importantly, it meant I had a powerful ally who could help me get even with Beauvoir, even if it came at a cost.
I’ll help with the pain,
the demon said. Immediately, a flood of sweet, numbing relief filled my empty socket, before trickling into the voodoo carvings decorating my torso and arms.

Sterilize. The. Wound.
The words came again, this time a sharp command.

I struggled to comply and, surprisingly, found the strength to lift my arms. Then my head. With a terrible surge of will I fought my way into a sitting position—the cuts in my abdomen flaring and throbbing even through whatever power Azazel was loaning me.

I pushed my shaky arms out behind me, steadying my frail body as my legs dangled over the edge of the gurney. I reached for the Vis, but still came up empty-handed. I glanced up, saw that I was alone, then caught a glimpse of myself in the cracked hand mirror on the table next to me and immediately wished I hadn’t. My left eye—or at least the place where my eye had been—was a friggin’ train wreck. An empty red wound, the skin charred and burnt, cauterized from the hot metal.

Oh fuck. Oh fuck, Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.
My eye.

My limbs were cold and heavy and some rational part of my brain told me I was in shock, but that part of my brain seemed far away. Too distant to be of any use. I tentatively reached my fingers toward the butchered socket and the long jagged tears from the box cutter that extended above and below the god-awful wound. Before my fingers connected, however, I toppled forward, body slipping from the gurney as a geyser of vomit spewed from my mouth like Old Glory.

I landed on the floor, involuntarily rolled onto my back, and wound up staring at the mirror attached to the too-bright dental lamp. I threw up again and fainted, the shock and trauma finally overwhelming my brain.
I hope I don’t drown in my vomit
, I thought, then realized,
maybe drowning in my own vomit might not be so bad after all.

TWENTY-FOUR:

Escape

“Holy Mary Mother of God.” The voice floated to me from a great distance filled with impenetrable gray fog. The speaker was female, her voice familiar, but I shoved the words away. “Yancy,” the speaker said, and then someone was shaking me gently, a strong hand grasping my shoulder. “
A mannaggia,
” she said. “I’ve got a pulse, but it’s weak and he’s in bad shape. Bad shape doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

How did I know her?
She seemed so familiar. Her name lingered on the tip of my tongue, like a word I couldn’t quite conjure.

“We don’t have much time,” a man replied, his voice gruff, cool, distracted. He too sounded vaguely familiar. “Shit,” the man said after a beat, his voice suddenly much closer, as though he were standing over me.

“Can you do anything for him?” the woman asked, her voice clearer now. Much closer.

“Not with something like that. Healing can only do so much, and the damage”—he paused as if surveying something—“it’s too extensive. This isn’t a cut you can slap a Band-Aid on, whore—”

“I told you not to call me that. Do it again and I’m going to castrate you with a dull knife.”

“The eye’s a complex organ,” the man continued without hardly a pause. “And, even if I could do something, which I can’t, we don’t have time for it. Put a dressing on it—I’ll carry him out. After that, we’ll regroup. Come up with a better plan.”

“Yancy.” The woman’s voice came again, now booming like a riot cop hollering through a blow horn. “If you can hear me, I’m gonna get you out of here, but this is probably going to hurt.” Then, before I could fully understand the meaning behind her words, a fresh outbreak of anguish exploded in my face, as if someone had just shoved a branding iron into my left eye.

I sat up with a scream, groping at my face with numb hands, fingers brushing over congealing blood and deep gouges in my skin, then grazing over gauze, which had been pressed over my unsightly injury. Ferraro was there, crouching down beside me, a first aid kit out and open, lying next to her shotgun on the concrete not far away. She looked worn and tired, bags under her eyes, dirt and grime generously coating her bronzed skin and staining her clothes. One of her eyes was swollen, a nasty shiner forming on her cheek.

Seeing that eye, that bruise, brought everything back in a single terrible flash: the zombie powder, the carved voodoo sigils, the removal of my …

I couldn’t finish the thought. Couldn’t bring myself to admit what had happened. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Then I noticed the other person in the room, standing five or six feet away, cradling a boxy, black MAC-10 in one hand, with a M4 slung across his back. He was scanning the room, gaze shifting from me to the stairway leading back up to the club. “Fuck, the Prophet,” I shouted, fighting to gain my feet, only to tumble back onto my ass—my legs too weak to support my weight.

“Relax, Yancy,” Ferraro said, talking slowly, calmly, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder. “You’re okay. Safe. And he’s working with us. For now.” She glanced at the man, her face tightening in concern, but she didn’t say anything else.

“What the holy hell are you talking about?” I asked, frantic, scooting back, staring at the man with my one good eye.

“We don’t have time for this,” the Prophet replied, rounding on me. “We’ve got a handful of minutes before the Baron returns, and we don’t want to be stuck in this basement, meat-monkey.”

“It’s a long story,” Ferraro said, then gave the man a hard, ferocious glare. “But the short part is we ran into each other and decided it was in our mutual best interest to temporarily work together. He wants Ong’s location as bad as we do, and we have a better chance of surviving if we work together than we do apart. But we need to go. Now. Right now. While the Baron is distracted. Can you walk?”

I glanced between Ferraro and the Prophet—the
Savage
-friggin’-Prophet, I reminded myself—disoriented and unsure what to do. That asshole with the MAC-10 was the bad guy, dammit, no two ways about it. In at least one timeline he was
personally
responsible for knocking me off this mortal coil.

I trusted him the way dogs trust mailmen.

But, I also probably wouldn’t walk away from here without help.

I grunted, nodded, too tired to care.
Whatever.

Once more I tried to push myself upright—this time, using the wall behind me for support. My legs were steadier, stronger, surer beneath me, which meant my system was burning off the last of Beauvoir’s zombie powder. I opened myself up to the Vis, reaching out for raw power, and received a trickle of energy like the drip from a leaky faucet. A wicked, angry snarl broke across my scarred face, thoughts of revenge suddenly occupying my thoughts—

Ferraro recoiled from me on instinct, as if she couldn’t stand to see what I’d become since we parted ways.

I tried to put her horrified look from my mind. I was a monster now, my outside finally matching my insides—it was written all over her face. I shoved that thought away too. Couldn’t worry about it now.

I was still weak, but I had enough energy to reach down, drawing on the steadfast power of the earth below me: pulling in strength and wrapping my senses in a cloak of unshakable bedrock, deadening my nerves against the hurt rampaging through me, drawing upon the rock-steady strength to survive. To continue on, whatever the cost. It was a temporary construct that allowed me to push past my body’s physical limits. That in itself could cause a boatload of long-term damage down the road, but I was way the hell past giving
any
shits about
anything
.

Once more, I reached up toward my face, but dropped my hand before actually touching the irrevocably maimed carnage. Surviving was the only thing that mattered now.

No, screw that shit sideways with a rake.

Survival wasn’t even all that important. The only thing that
really
mattered was getting Ferraro out of this shit hole and making Beauvoir pay for what he’d done to me. Pay for what he’d done to those poor kids he’d enslaved and pressed into service. That son of a bitch wasn’t going to walk away, even if it meant I didn’t walk away either.

Some things were worth dying for.

The Vis surged in me, growing incrementally stronger with every second, and as it did my legs stabilized beneath me. With Ferraro and the Prophet watching on—regarding me the way you might a mentally unstable gorilla—I reached down and grabbed a long piece of fabric from the floor. A strip from my shirt, torn away during my torture session. I wrapped it around my head, hiding my empty eye socket, then tied a snug knot at the back of my skull. I glanced at the hand mirror: not a great eye patch, but better than nothing.

Stiffly, I reached over and snagged my jacket from the floor, shrugging into it.

“You good?” the Prophet asked, giving me a long, thorough once-over.

“I’ll be better when you give me that M4,” I replied, nodding toward the weapon hugging his back. My powers were recovering, but right now most of the juice I had was directed squarely at keeping me upright. With my hand cannon gone, I needed something to slay bodies with.

The man hesitated, lips tight in consideration, then shrugged and pulled the weapon from his body, holding it out to me. “The mag’s full … well, twenty-eight rounds. The M4 always seems to jam up on me with a full thirty.”

I hobbled over, moving slowly, deliberately.

True, Beauvoir hadn’t done anything to my legs, but he’d sliced my abs up pretty good, and that wreaked absolute havoc when it came to walking. Greedily, I snatched up the gun, slipped the tactical, three-point sling around my shoulders—wincing as the rough nylon fabric rubbed against the carvings on my chest—then canted the gun onto its side, ensuring a round was chambered, the weapon ready.

The Prophet reached into his back pocket and liberated an additional curved magazine, brass shell casings lining the top. “Another twenty-eight, here,” he said. I took it with a grunted “thanks” and slipped the thing into my coat pocket, its weight reassuring. Victory through superior firepower.