Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) (44 page)

With only a little hesitation, I moved around to its side, tracing my fingers over the thick fur covering its neck and upper body, then hoisted myself onto its back, sitting forward of the wings, straddling the base of its beefy neck. I grabbed a fistful of hair in both hands and willed the creature into an odd loping trot, its head dipping and swaying as it moved.

I gotta say—aside from the swarm of monsters overhead, the unholy demonic snake ready to obliterate me, and the rogue mage assault squad looking to murder me—this was cool. Like supremely badass. I was riding a friggin’ griffin. Well, Garuda, but that’s just semantics, right?

All that was left to do now was take this baby for a test-drive.

THIRTY-FIVE:

Hell Ride

With a cluck of my tongue, I guided the beast toward the downed motorcycle, scanning the ground for Ferraro. She was nowhere to be seen. There was a crumpled swatch of jungle greenery smeared with bit of red, which suggested her likely landing spot after the crash, but she wasn’t there anymore. Splattered droplets of blood led from the crash site and deeper into the dense jungle growth beyond. She couldn’t have gotten far, though, not in the few scant minutes we’d been here, and not with any kind of serious injury.

A flash of movement near the tree line caught my eye.

I let out a pent-up breath as Ferraro’s face, chalky and pale, appeared between a pair of squat palms. She had a nasty gash on her forehead, bleeding liberally, but other than that she seemed okay. I was also glad to see she had my grenade launcher cradled in her hands and the satchel of ammo from my saddlebag slung across her body.

“Yancy?” she called, creeping forward, though not breaking from tree cover. “You good?”

“As good as can be expected,” I shouted back.

“What’s that thing you’re on?” she asked, eyeing the Garuda beneath me with supreme suspicion.

“This?” I patted the creature’s thick broad shoulder. “This guy’s our ri—”

The Garuda below me shrieked in surprise and surged forward with a mind of its own, lurching into a stumbling run, then launching itself into the air; its great wings thrusting, pummeling the air, lifting us up. I fell forward, arms encircling the creature’s neck in a shaky-handed death grip, doing my damnedest not to slip off and plummet to the ground below, which would’ve been awfully embarrassing.

A bolt of angry red light, a sizzling glob of Vis, streaked past me as the ground dropped away, and another quickly followed in its wake. I glanced down as the Garuda banked hard left, circling away from the sudden assault, and caught sight of the Brown-Robes pouring in through the axis mundi, led by Black Jack and the Savage Prophet. The Prophet’s eyes were still red and swollen from the OC spray, probably would be for a good long while, which made me absurdly and inexplicably happy.

The incoming assault squad immediately fell into a tactical defensive formation, while simultaneously opening fire on little ol’ me.

I stole a peek toward the tree line, looking for Ferraro, but she was gone. Vanished back into the deep shadow of the jungle.

Good.

I put her from mind as streaks of light and lances of flame flew at me. With a whisper of will, I tossed up a hasty defensive shield, a semi-translucent wall of blue, just in time to deflect several of the blasts, then willed the Garuda higher into the skies, out of their effective firing range. The bird-guardian heeded my command in an instant, great wings stretching back to give us more lift. It took us all of a few blinks before we leveled out, cruising along eighty or ninety feet above the ground, well out of the Brown-Robes’ reach.

With a nasty grin, I snagged a frag grenade from one of the pouches on my vest and popped the pin, keeping my hand clamped down on the spoon as I ordered the Garuda to circle back around. Once we were positioned more or less overhead, I dropped the grenade, letting gravity take over and deliver a little death from above. Maybe the Brown-Robes couldn’t reach me, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t reach them. A five count later a rattling boom and a ball of fire billowed up from where the Brown Robes had been, followed by strings of muted cursing.

I was watching the unfolding scene below so intently, I didn’t notice the second Garuda until it veered into the side of my mount, its broad, furry head bashing into us, knocking us hard left. My body swayed from the hit, hands scrambling to maintain their tenuous grip on my ride’s thick fur. For one long horrifying second, the scene of Ferraro and me careening through the portal only to be thrown from the bike flashed through my head. This was that all over again, only now if I toppled there’d be no getting back up.

Not from a drop of ninety friggin’ feet.

But my mount responded to both my subconscious will and adrenaline-fueled fear, dipping one side of its body down, then jerking up hard, halting my slide, affording me the chance to readjust my grasp. I’d barely scrambled back in place when yet another bird-beast dove toward us from above, its wings nearly flat against its body, its beak trained on us like a heat-seeker. With gritted teeth, I lifted one hand free, palm open, and blasted the Garuda with a gout of flame, setting its wings aflame.

The bastard burned, its body going up like dry grass after a lightning strike.

It shrieked and flailed, but fell straight toward us all the same, a meteor cannonballing from the sky—

My winged mount banked again, this time throwing its bulk into a blazing-fast corkscrew to the right, the force of the roll so powerful it sandwiched me flat against the creature’s neck. The experience was a bit unpleasant and nausea inducing, but way better than plummeting to my certain doom below. We came out of the daredevil maneuver, leveling out as the burning Garuda careened past us, missing us by inches, a trail of rank, oily smoke wafting up behind it. I absently patted my mount’s broad shoulder.

Maybe some part of this thing’s fighting spirit was still hiding in there after all, working to keep me alive.

I glanced down, surveying the forest stretched out below, thinking I might try to lob another grenade down onto the asshole Brown-Robes, but was surprised to see Darlene’s squad of Judges had arrived in earnest. The black-clad Judges streamed through, unleashing brutal attacks against the Brown-Robes, who returned fire in kind: a flame lance here, the ground splitting asunder there, white hot beams of death carving through the foliage. It didn’t take long before the Brown-Robes were back on their heels, breaking up into smaller groups, scattering, retreating for tree cover.

In my periphery, I caught movement in a small clearing, so once more I clucked at my ride, pulling up on the dense fur under my hands. The motions were unnecessary, but I did them on reflex, and it wasn’t like the beast minded. The Garuda pushed out his formidable wings, angling to the left, catching an unfelt current of air, and suddenly we were spinning right. Flying toward the clearing—a sparse patch of earth, abundant with tall grasses and strange flowers, but devoid of trees.

We glided over the small meadow, taking one lap then another, and it didn’t take me long to spot a rustle of movement below: Ferraro slinking along the edge of the clearing, the grenade launcher at the low ready.

But she wasn’t alone.

A Brown-Robe slipped from the trees maybe twenty feet behind her, moving forward on silent feet, quiet as a bunny farting into the wind. Stalking Ferraro. Inching closer every minute. It was hard to tell from my elevation, but this Brown-Robe was awfully tiny, a petite thing, with narrow shoulders and a slim build. A woman. Not that it should’ve mattered—her gender didn’t change a friggin’ thing, she was an evil asshole just like the rest of ’em—but it
did
matter. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve killed my share of the fairer sex, but the act was always just a hair more difficult.

As the Brown-Robe padded ever closer to Ferraro, she raised her hands. The weaves for a devastating beam of sunfire—a white hot spear of absolute death—materialized in her palms, and that decided me. It was the Brown-Robe or Ferraro, I reminded myself, and that was no contest. Ferraro deserved to live, and if that meant some faceless McGoon—even a female one—had to die, so be it. I pulled my pistol, leveling the behemoth gun, then directed my Garuda into a treacherous dive.

The wind slapped against me as my mount dropped like a stone, plummeting in a move that put my belly in my throat, and my heart straight through the top of my skull. “Ferraro,” I shouted, summoning a simple construct of air and fire to amplify my voice, knowing the working would also give away my position and not caring. “Get down! Now!”

I pulled my Garuda out of the dive as Ferraro spun, head swiveling up, seeing me before catching sight of the approaching Brown-Robe behind her. The sunfire lashed out cobra-strike fast, but Ferraro was already moving, throwing her weight right, not into a smooth dive, but rather into an awkward face-plant, belly-flop combo, which was hands down the least graceful maneuver I’d ever seen from her. Chalk it up to the motorcycle accident, I guess.

The move belonged on a friggin’ blooper reel, but it
did
manage to do the trick: a death-ray of brilliant, blinding light carved through the space she’d been a moment ago, slicing through a copse of trees as cleanly as a buzz saw, setting the trees ablaze as they toppled over with the
crack
and
snap
of breaking branches.

“Dammit, Yancy!” the Brown-Robe shrieked, swinging her hands toward me.

For a moment I froze, gun leveled and ready, but my former resolve forgotten, my finger motionless on the trigger. I
knew
that voice. No mistaking it. Trisha Galindo. A member with the Fist of the Staff—one of my old teammates. She and I weren’t close, not in the way James and I were, but we’d run plenty of ops together. She’d saved my life more than once, and I’d returned the favor in kind.

Even more importantly, though, we’d shared many a beer over a backyard barbeque and I wouldn’t have hesitated to call her a friend. In my head, I could see her smiling, laughing as she nursed a cool drink on the covered patio of her place in Scranton. Smoke billowing up from the grill, the juicy aroma of meat dancing in the air as I puffed on a cigarette and enjoyed a beer of my own.

Knowing Black Jack was a treacherous douche-noodle was bad.
Awful
.

Knowing James might’ve sold me out for whatever misplaced notion was worse.

Knowing there were even more of my friends involved in this coup made me want to vomit. I didn’t want these dick-faces to remake the world in their image, but what was the price to stop them? How much bloodshed would be required, how many friends would I have to put down to finish the job?

I hesitated for a moment longer—that was my friend down there, for Pete’s sake—then saw the weaves for another beam of sunfire forming in her hands.

I pulled the trigger, emptying the cylinder,
pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop
.

Even though the gun offered me enhanced abilities—better accuracy, damn near no recoil or muzzle flip, and the equivalent of a Vis-silencer—firing from thirty feet out from the back of a giant, flapping eagle monster isn’t like popping off a few rounds at the range. Most of my shots went wide: Puffs of dirt mushroomed up from the ground around her. The base of a wobbly palm tree behind her detonated like a bomb blast, a shower of wooden shrapnel exploding out as the palm toppled.

One round, however, flew true and clipped her in the neck, just above her collarbone. There was a spray of gore as brown cloth ripped away to reveal a savage, ragged wound. The force of the hit spun Trisha in a full circle as she tumbled to the ground like a crumpled cigarette butt, her hood slipping off in the process. She stared up at me, her brown eyes wide in shock and fear, her tanned skin suddenly waxy and pale, her thin lips quivering, trembling, dotted with bloody phlegm. One hand uselessly clutched at her neck, trying to stop the bleeding, but she knew it was too late for that.

The terror in her eyes said everything that needed saying.

I was tempted to touch down, to throw myself from the back of the Garuda and go to her. To hold her hand as she bled out. As she died. She’d obviously made a lot of mistakes, but we were still friends, and she didn’t deserve to go alone. No one should have to die by themselves.

But then another Brown-Robe emerged from the opposite side of the clearing, clawing a ginormous hunk of stone from the ground with a carload of Vis, then hurling the thing at me with bone-crushing force.

“Just go,” Ferraro hollered, taking aim at the shadowy mage and popping off several rounds from the launcher. “Get Ong. We’ll rendezvous at the pyramid.”

I nodded, pulling my beast into a sharp climb, dodging the stone by a hairsbreadth. “Be safe,” I shouted back to Ferraro, who was already slipping away, finding concealment and cover while she laid down suppressive fire. My eye lingered on Trisha Galindo’s motionless body. It was stained with blood. It’d been me or her. Her or Ferraro. Still, looking at her hurt my heart. She’d forced my hand, but that didn’t change what I’d done.