Strange Magic: A Yancy Lazarus Novel Read online

  Plus, giving myself a little extra space and time was good and necessary for my soul. I’d killed a man back in New Orleans. It had been the right decision and I would take the same shot again. But still. I killed a man.

  In action flicks, the hero can murder a football stadium full of bad guys and never even blink. That’s not the way it is in real life though, or at least it shouldn’t be. When the firefight is on, it’s important to push your emotions into the background. Feeling all soft-hearted and conflicted instead of pulling the trigger will get you killed. Eventually, the firefight ends. Eventually, those emotions come roaring back like a crazy ex, and that crazy metaphorical ex will toss all of your emotional furniture right off the balcony and into the pool.

  Killing someone is not glorious. I’ve killed a good number of people and each one has taken a toll and left a mark. The guy I shot back in the alley would never go to another movie. He would never eat out at a nice restaurant with his significant other. He would never pray or laugh or cry again. Whatever bad or good he might have gone on to do—he wouldn’t. A life, full of possibility, snuffed out. It hurt.

  He shouldn’t have tried to kill me.

  Still, I would carry his memory.

  I was glad for the ride, it gave me the space I needed to vent and grieve, to decompress and deal with all the shit.

  I could have camped out in the Camino, but I wanted a shower, and having four walls around me also seemed like a good idea.

  The motel I pulled into was called the Ranger, a cheap and dirty off brand place, which proudly displayed a gaudy red-neon sign boasting both vacancies and—I kid you not—‘Color TV.’ Seriously, what century do we live in? There were two other cars loitering in the pothole-filled lot, but it looked like everyone was in for the night, not surprising since it was well past eleven. The building was small and made of cheap motel stucco—typical for the southwest—and sat in an L-shape. The renting office was at the front of the L with fifteen or so rooms jutting off and to the right on both floors.

  I made my way into the renting office, a small bell above the door gave out a little tinkle. The room was devoid of life, the only occupant was a small flyer rack against the far wall, littered with pamphlets which proclaimed all the wonderful attractions Las Cruces had to offer. The room smelled of stale coffee and stale air, a harsh piney odor hung in the room like a haze trying to cover the scent of poor maintenance—you can only polish a turd so much.

  After a few moments, a moderately overweight man of maybe fifty, with gray swoops at either temple, appeared behind a small, wood-paneled desk housing an antique computer and a host of loose-leaf papers.

  “Evenin’ Sir, what can I do for ya’ tonight?” The man’s accent was thick with the twang of the country, his drawl, slow but pleasant.

  “Good evening,” I said, stifling an abrupt yawn with my fist. “Been one heck of a long day, I need a room for the night. A bottom unit.” Under normal circumstances, the clerk might have been suspicious—it was late and it looked like I had been in a helluva scrap, which was true. My glamorous jacket though, ensured a bored and slightly annoyed look never left his face.

  Even without the jacket, though, he probably wouldn’t have taken too much note of me. I cultivate the unremarkable, it’s one of my minor hobbies. Oh, and it helps me not to die. The ability to fly under the radar is crucial to creating a certain degree of safety for myself—it makes me harder to find and harder to follow, both important things when you have as many enemies as I do.

  “Well ‘at shouldn’t be a problem,” the clerk said after a moment, “we’re nearly empty on the bottom, so you can have your pick. It’s gonna run you forty-five fifty for the night, and you’re free to stop by in the morning and grab a complementary coffee. Check out time’s at eleven—if you steal the towels we’ll charge your card for them. I’ll need an ID and a credit card.”

  I pulled both from my wallet, the license and credit card read Rick Daily and both were fakes, good fakes. I have about twenty other aliases that I go by, each has his own set of ID’s (including passports), credit cards, and bank accounts. Only a few people in the world know more than a handful of those names, and none know all of them. Anonymity is king.

  I grabbed my rucksack from the camper and headed over to my room. I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels in my time, you might say I am something of a connoisseur. The room concealed behind door 7 was exactly as I had envisioned it. Only dirtier, which is saying something rather significant. A full bed covered with a worn motel comforter of blues and grays sat against the left wall, a chipped nightstand was snuggled cozily against the right side of the bed. A TV, straight out of the 1950s, sat on the opposite wall. The white walls of the room had been stained a sickening yellowish color from years of accumulated tobacco smoke. The smell was pungent—and I smoke like a chimney.

  All I wanted was sleep, but in my line of work it’s always better to play things safe. It was especially wise to take precautions tonight, considering I knew there were bad people actively gunning for me. It was unlikely that anyone would’ve been able to track me, but not outside the realm of possibility. I mean, it had only taken those yahoos at the bar about twelve hours to find me.

  Against my better judgment, I placed a call to my friend out west to let him know where I was and filled him in about the attack outside the bar; then I went about setting up my defensive wards for the evening.

  It’s hard to create defensive wards for a motel room because they lack the foundational domicilium seal, which is optimal for creating a Vis barrier. A domicilium seal surrounds most proper homes, or really any place where human beings live for any extended period of time. It’s a barrier of sorts, a super-real energy field, more solidly grounded in material reality than just about anything. They accumulate a certain energy from the ordinary, the mundane, the routine affairs of everyday human life.

  That energy is kind of like a static charge: it builds and builds and builds as mortals shuffle their way across the carpet of life, and overtime that charge can become damn potent. It does take time—a seal won’t pop up overnight—but eventually that invested static life force, Vim, will create a barrier which is too real for most beings of Spirit to cross over without invitation. Precisely the reason a dirty Vamp can’t enter your home without permission. Though seals are not impenetrable to supernatural beings, they’re damned close even without wards.

  Four walls and a roof does not a home make, however. Hotels, like the Ranger, didn’t have any such seal—they’re full of people in transition and thus lack the necessary stability for creating a solid barrier. This is the only part about being a drifter that sucks. I’ve lived this way for a long time though, and have managed to create some defensive wards despite my limitations. Improvise, adapt, and overcome I say.

  I salted the door and window with grocery-store rock salt, which is hell on wheels against beings of pure spirit, like ghosts or poltergeists. Then I placed a charm bag—a small burlap sack filled with ritual ingredients and infused with a small measure of power—underneath my pillow, meant to help hide me from supernatural predators.

  Finally, I rummaged around in my rucksack until I found my pack of sticky note wards. Yes, sticky notes—little yellow ones. When a guy’s on the move and without the protection of a permanent home, it’s good to have a backup plan; the sticky notes are my plan and they work well, thank you very much. Each one has been inscribed (by a magic marker—magic, get it) with various names and symbols of power, and then invested with a slight amount of latent energy, which is stored in the sigils. The notes don’t last long—they degrade and lose their potency after a month or so—but that means I only need to create a new batch twelve times a year. Work smarter not harder, right?

  I pulled off the top sheet, covered front and back with writing, and affixed it to the door. The sticky note would wake me up if any supernatural predator stopped by, and it also had a viscous surprise for anything that tried to force the door open.

 
With my dirty and nicotine stained room as warded as I could manage, I washed up, stripped down to my jeans, and hit the rack. It would be an early day and I deserved a little undisturbed shut-eye.

  FIVE:

  The Ranger

  They say there’s no rest for the wicked, which I guess is true since I woke up after only two hours of sleep. Something was in the parking lot—I had no idea what, but the sticky note had given me a heads up—and I was positive of two things: one, whatever was out there was bad news, like uber-smart-gun-wielding-bears bad news. Two, whatever was out there was about to make my evening absolutely craptastic.

  I had enough time to get my shirt, jacket, and boots on before the thing in the parking lot opened up on my room with a spray of automatic machine gun fire. I leapt behind the bed—a thin and feeble shelter against machine gun rounds—and curled into a tight ball, back exposed to the front wall but covered by my Kevlar strength coat. Most of the rounds went wide or remained at thigh level, well above my heroic, and not at all cowardly, fetal position on the floor. A few strays passed through the mattress and smacked me square in the lower back. The jacket prevented the lead from penetrating, but my kidneys still felt like they’d been worked over by Mighty Mouse. When the firing finally let up, I rolled over with a grunt, and fetched my gun from the nightstand.

  I moved into a low crouch and took a quick looksee over the edge of the bed. The nightstand, walls, and TV were riddled with wounds—chunks of wood and shattered glass decorated the floor. The guest phone lay devastated near the window, its electronic guts spilled out in a heap. The damage was intense yet, surprisingly, the room didn’t look that much worse than when I had checked in. Before, the room had been a real P.O.S.—now it was a real P.O.S. sporting a few holes. Not a huge loss. The damage might even motivate the owner to consider some renovations. There’s always a silver lining.

  I dropped back into the prone, my head on the floor, in case the gunman decided to indulge in another round of target practice. I stared at the entryway from beneath the bed, gun fixed at ankle level. The door handle rattled. Then, after a moment, click. The cheap hotel door exploded outward in a shower of brilliant light and wood-turned-shrapnel pieces. Apparently, my sticky note construct had survived the initial wave of gunfire.

  Good for me, something actually worked right.

  I cautiously moved back into a crouch, taking advantage of the few seconds I had to ready myself for another onslaught. I held my pistol with my right hand, my left was empty and palm open, holding the weaves for either a defensive air shield or a lance of fire.

  The tip of a gun barrel popped through the smashed doorframe, followed by a gunman peeking around the corner. I let loose a javelin of red-white flame, thick as my wrist. With a whip-like crack, it tore the gun from the assailant’s hand and sent it clattering onto the parking lot asphalt. A vaguely humanoid thing, wearing black fatigue bottoms, blurred through the door toward me.

  It was all long arms, crushing teeth, and gray, flabby flesh interspersed with ragged tuffs of yellow fur. Its visage was vaguely reminiscent of a feral hyena: elongated muzzle filled with vicious shark teeth, a punched in snout, and beady, deep-set eyes, all framed by a cropped mane of spotted golden fur. It scared the living bejesus out of me.

  The monster surged forward in a rolling gorilla-like gait, quickly eating the distance between us.

  “Well crap,” I said to no one in particular.

  The thing cannonballing toward me like death on roller-skates was a Rakshasa—a filthy scavenger dredged up from the lowest pit of creation. The things aren’t a common sight, particularly outside of India where ancestral ties and totems of power invest them with minor deity-like power. And usually when they are running around, they hide behind human flesh masks, all the better to avoid detection and hunt their prey.

  I unleashed another spear of angry heat on instinct, but I might as well have shot the shit-eating thing with a squirt gun for all the good it did. Rakshasa have a notorious reputation as mage killers because of their natural resistance to all things Vis. The flame rolled around the Rakshasa’s charging form in a flare of light, setting the curtains ablaze, but leaving the creature intact. Man, the owner of the hotel was going to charge my credit card for sure.

  I opened up with my revolver, pulling the trigger twice in rapid succession.

  The creature flowed around those first two shots, it limbs moving as though the bones beneath were gelatinous. My third, more carefully aimed shot, clipped the thing in its ankle, gauging out a fist-sized chunk of loose, gray flesh. Black blood, like tar, sprayed the carpet in a shower of gore—the Rakshasa pulsed forward, unfazed. I took aim at its knee, hoping to hobble the bastard, but before I could pull the trigger, the creature hurled itself onto the ceiling—yes the ceiling—and scampered toward me. I stared on in slack-jawed surprise.

  Hadn’t seen that coming.

  I dropped and rolled onto my back, tracking its progress across the ceiling, hoping to get another shot off before the mauling began.

  I felt supremely outclassed as the beast launched itself at me from overhead, crashing into me like a semi-truck. Pain exploded through my ribs, back, and neck as it pinned me to the floor, the wind gone from my lungs as the Rakshasa’s immense weight pressed in on me. The reek coming off the creature was almost enough to push me into delirium: an awful stench of old meat, soured garbage, and musky, unwashed animal. The texture of its saggy flesh was like an old, rubbery boot and it let off heat like a personal furnace.

  God, my life supremely sucks sometimes.

  I had, by some magnificent stroke of good fortune, managed to interpose my revolver between myself and the Rakshasa’s formidable, though saggy, body. I pulled the trigger three times in quick succession. The detonation reverberated in my chest and a flood of warm viscous liquid ran over my gun hand.

  Gross, but oddly satisfying.

  The creature let out a yowl of frustrated pain and rage as it pulled away. Crushing pressure engulfed my arm. The world rattled at the edges. My body jerked up and out, and just like that, I was sailing toward the large front window; another bit of good fortune, since I probably would’ve broken my back had I collided with the wall.

  Right through the window I went. Most of the glass had broken out during the first spray of gunfire, saving me from a myriad of minor lacerations. I landed a full ten feet out on the rough parking lot blacktop. The son of a bitch had a heck of an arm, I’ll give it that much.

  I rolled into the fall, robbing the impact of its full and devastating effect, but the pain was still significant. My rotator cuff shrieked its protest while my back and knees joined in the impromptu rally. In movies, action heroes regularly get up from this kind of thing, but let me tell you something: that’s a bunch of bullshit. I’m raising the flag here.

  All across the country, people sustain serious injuries from slipping on ice. To offer some perspective here, the second leading cause of accidental death in the world is falling. Seriously, falling. Getting tossed twenty feet is much worse than slipping on ice by an order of magnitude that’s hard to calculate. Even still, this was the best possible thing that could’ve happened to me. At least with some distance between us, I would be able to do something.

  Yes, getting my ass hurled through a window and into the parking lot was good news—I know, I know, my life is amazing.

  My revolver was out of rounds and I didn’t have time for a reload, so that option was out. But the Rakshasa’s boxy little automatic—it looked like a PP-19 Bizon—wasn’t far off. With a grunt of effort, I flipped onto my belly and started crawling for it. The gun couldn’t have been more than two feet away when a hail of ninja kunai knives soared through the open window in my direction.

  Not only was my assailant almost physically unstoppable, supernaturally resistant to the Vis, and military trained—it was an honest-to-goodness ninja. A ninja. In what world is that fair or okay? If you ever have to say that you’ve been assaulted by a supernatural, man-e
ating, hyena-ninja, it is a sure sign that your life has gone terribly, terribly wrong somewhere.

  Most of the blades were hastily thrown and went wide, but one of the sharp matte-black razors grazed my outstretched arm, leaving a flare of bright crimson pain in its wake. The Rakshasa hurtled through the broken window like an Olympic athlete—never mind that it had most of one foot missing and several fist-sized holes in its torso—before launching itself at me.

  That was exactly the kind of mistake I needed.

  I couldn’t stop it outright with the Vis and its mass was far too great to halt with raw force, but I had a plan. I reached into the well of magma-hot power, drawing forth energy deep within the dusty New Mexico soil. Fine flows of fire, air, and earth sprouted to life from the ground before me.

  With a great crack-thud, a chunk of concrete and asphalt big as a car tore itself free from the parking lot and whipped at the incoming Rakshasa. A stone hurled from some giant and magnificent sling. This was my version of David and Goliath. Now, the Rakshasa may have been big, and it may have been immune to direct Vis constructs, but it was not a being of pure spirit—like a ghost or poltergeist. Therefore, in the real world at least, it was still constrained by the laws of physics. While suspended in the air, it was on a fixed and unalterable trajectory.

  The enormous chunk of rock sideswiped the Rakshasa like a NFL linebacker and the creature was as susceptible to the impact as any other material object would have been. Even though the beast was heavy, the rock was heavier and moving at a greater rate of speed—force equals mass times acceleration. The rock won the math equation. My high school physics teacher was right, math is applicable to real, everyday life.

  The Rakshasa crashed into a parked car about thirty feet away, sandwiched between the now twisted steel frame of the car and the enormous boulder.

  The rock had smashed up a large portion of the Rakshasa’s jaw, one of its lank and disproportionate arms hung limply down the side of its body. It tried moving forward, but couldn’t. I hadn’t just hit the beast with a big rock—I’d hit it with a big rock made of asphalt, superheated with weaves of intense thermal energy. The tar melted into hot black sludge, which clung to the Rakshasa’s form, impeding its movements, even if not stopping them completely.