He looked at Snow. She, in turn, avoided his gaze and stood near Krannor, who busied himself reading through a set of scrolls she’d given him.
“Snow,” Cross said. He couldn’t whisper – the damn train was too loud – so he had to raise his voice to almost a shout. “Are you all right, Snow?”
She didn’t answer. She kept her eyes on Krannor.
“Snow. What happened?”
She refused to look up.
The arms of her cloak had been torn away, displaying deep cuts and a handful of black and blue bite marks. He knew what had happened: they’d broken her. It wasn’t Red who’d done it, as he’d originally suspected, but the vampires. Snow had been a captive long enough, so they’d had plenty of time. Almost anyone subjected to their treatment would break, no matter how resolute or determined. There was only so much a human could endure, and vampires were absolute in their methods. Once a human was properly broken, there was little chance of ever coming back.
A sick feeling rose in his stomach. Try as he did to dispel images of what her torture must have been like, he couldn’t.
“Snow!?”
“She is not allowed to speak to you at this time,” Krannor said coolly. He turned and looked at Cross. “And you are not allowed to speak at all.”
“Fuck you.”
Cross didn’t see the war wight until it struck. Lengthy claws reached through the bars and raked him across the chest. He gasped as both his strength and his air were sucked straight out of him. The claw wounds were deep, and they burned like he’d been cut with ice. Even his blood was cold as it ran down his stomach and across his shirt.
“Anything else to say?” Krannor smiled.
“Yes,” Cross managed, biting his teeth to block out the pain. “Why did Knight defect from Rath? What’s he really up to? I don’t believe that he’s trying to reconcile with the Ebon Cities. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The lich’s smile broadened. This time Cross was ready, and he pulled away from the bars moments before the war wight’s claws took him.
Cross’ victory was short lived. Krannor leapt through the bars with a dimensional folding, a translocative jump. The lich gripped Cross’ throat in a vise-like grip. He felt his windpipe being crushed. Air built up in his lungs, which he pictured filling and bursting like balloons. He had no strength with which to fight back.
“You should learn respect,” the lich smiled.
Cross couldn’t answer. He nearly passed out before Krannor finally released him. He crashed to the ground, gasping for breath, wishing feeling back into his arms and legs.
The Old One and Red were both suddenly in the car. Cross wasn’t sure when they’d arrived.
Red held Snow in her arms like she was her long-lost daughter, and Snow set her head on Red’s shoulder and kept her eyes locked on Cross. She continued to gaze at him with hate, like he’d committed some horrible crime.
Knight’s hood was pulled back so that Cross could see the ancient vampire’s cracked ebon skin, his sunken eyes and his decaying flesh. His hands ended in jagged yellow claws shaped like a bird’s talons, and his long and forked tongue dangled out of his fanged mouth like a thrashing eel.
“Is it…time…already?” Cross coughed. He felt the wounds on his chest freezing. The ice was working its way into his blood.
Krannor hauled Cross to his feet and held him a good foot off of the ground. Cross was brought to the edge of the cage. A terrible choir of screams bellowed from outside, and through that din Cross just made out the baying of massive hounds.
We’re near the Rift already, he thought in dismay. We’ll be in Rath by sundown tomorrow.
We must prepare you, the Old One told him without words. The vampire opened his taloned hand and revealed a dim black bulb the size of a turnip. The sphere held a spark of green flame deep in its core, like a torch buried in liquid amber. The subtle green shine radiated sickness and power. Cross didn’t need his spirit to feel the monstrous arcane potential in the bomb, far too much to all be contained in a single, small device.
That one bomb was linked to others. When it exploded, so would they.
Krannor set Cross down, and then delivered a sharp kick to the back of his leg. He screamed. He felt bones crack. Blinded with pain, Cross fell to the floor, and he would have toppled over if not for Krannor’s claw, which painfully dug into the meat of his shoulder.
Hang on, he told himself. Stay. Finish this.
A war wight took the orb from Knight and opened the cage door. The bomb glowed brighter the closer it came to Cross. He sensed the power it was linked to, felt it pulse against him like heat. Krannor pulled Cross’ head painfully back by his hair, and the wight walked towards him with the orb held level with Cross’ face.
They’re going to make me swallow it.
“How many?” he asked. “How many of those things are there?” He didn’t actually expect an answer, but asking the questions kept him conscious. “There are more, aren’t there? You hid them all over Rath, I bet. It would have been easy to get vampire spies into a city of vampires to hide them for you, right?” No one answered.
Did I catch them off guard? he wondered. “How about the obelisk? Are any of the bombs attached to it?”
“Wow,” Red laughed. “Shut up, you moron, before you make it worse for yourself.”
“Worse than getting a pyroclast bomb shoved down my throat?” he shouted. “I’m the trigger, aren’t I? That’s how it’s going to work: when the vampires of Rath sacrifice me to destroy the obelisk, all of those linked explosives are going to go off at once. Am I right?” Red’s stunned face gave Cross the answer.
The war wight towered over him. Cross smelled sewage and brimstone radiate from the bomb.
“Am I right?!” he shouted again.
Cross knew that he was about to die, and he tried to prepare himself for it, tried to draw in a heroic final breath or think a final heroic thought, but all he could think of was his spirit, and what a crime it was that he wouldn’t get to say goodbye to her.
To his immense surprise, the wight hesitated, and it stepped back. Knight shifted in place.
“You were never going to make good with the Ebon Cities, were you?” Cross pressed. His heart pounded wildly. He felt like he was going to be sick. “You set up this whole obelisk business to get them to deal with you, but it’s a ruse. When they sacrifice me, the bombs go off, Rath will blow up, the obelisk will blow up…the Ebon Cities will lose one of their strongest cities, and in the same stroke you’ll take magic away from humans forever.”
God, he thought, it’s brilliant.
“And you win.”
I win.
“So…that’s it? You were one of us, God damn it! What the hell happened?”
The Old One glared at him with rotted eyes. His face was surrounded by a faint and sickly shine.
Knight hovered towards him soundlessly. His tattered cloak dragged across the rattling train floor. The car rocked and shook as the Necronaught thundered over the Carrion Rift.
What HAPPENED?!
The voice cut through Cross’ mind like a hot knife.
I. Became. This. This shell. This disease. Forever hated by both sides of this ridiculous war. I sacrificed my own life to give humankind a chance, and in reward I was doomed to an eternal damnation. I’m one of the enemy! I cannot, and will not, accept vampires…and I cannot forgive the likes of you. So I condemn you. I condemn you both. I condemn you all.
Knight snatched the pyroclast bomb from the war wight. Krannor yanked Cross’ head back.
Cross took them by surprise. He threw all his weight backwards and into Krannor. He brought his bound hands up in front of him and pushed the lich off balance. Cross lunged at Knight.
Time slowed down. The war wight stepped in Cross’ path and grabbed both of his gauntleted hands with its cold and steaming claws. Cross screamed as the wight’s talons ripped through his wrists. Those blades cut him down to the bone, but he pulled back with all his
strength and tore his hands free from the gauntlets.
The containment gauntlet that covered Cross’ necrotically diseased left hand flew apart. Termites made of black shadow exploded all over Cross’ arms and seared his skin with their necrotic chill. Shadows raced up his chest. The cold was so deep it gnawed straight through to his bones.
Cross went numb. He knew he had only a moment before he died.
He lashed out. Though robbed of his magic, Cross was now covered in raw and destructive arcane power, the magic of the disease he’d been infected with when he’d battled the hound in the forest.
That disease had only one purpose: to annihilate.
And just as he’d done in the forest when he’d faced the hound, Cross grabbed hold of those shifting shadow energies, and he channeled them with a natural mastery over magic that both he and his sister had been born with. He let the darkness swallow him, but at the same time he took just enough control of it to push the black energy in the direction that he wanted it to travel.
Straight into the bomb.
Pain shredded his body. Cross trapped the pyroclast bomb in a shroud of Wormwood energies, in the shadows that existed between moments. Darkness soaked him. Cross folded the shadows around the bomb, sealed it away from its siblings in a cage of utter darkness.
Only one bomb would go off. The bomb there on the Necronaught.
Cross’ last conscious thoughts were of Snow. He saw her, at four years old, her gangly hair a mess thanks to the plum pudding she’d used to cover her face like war paint. He saw her, at thirteen, sleeping until noon no matter how bright it was outside or how hot it was or how many times he threw pillows at her in bed while she slept. He saw her, a woman grown, brave and strong, so wanting to help him and to do the right thing that she made a secret decision that would ultimately lead her to her death.
He thought of her, and his heart died. He hoped she would feel no pain.
Red and Snow screamed. Knight’s eyes went wide with shock. Cross clenched his teeth and pulled his rotting hand back from the moment. He released the pyroclast, and in doing so allowed the explosion to happen.
The first blast tore out in a wave of acid and flame. Steel and shrapnel exploded as the detonation ruptured the car. Fire roared down the access tubes in the ceiling and into the other cars, racing along until it found the fuel tanks. When the fuel caught, the entire train rattled sideways with a caustic blast and was thrown off its course. Cars groaned and crashed into one another. A crescendo of thunder shook the air.
Cross screamed. He stood at the core of the blast.
The cars at the rear of the train buckled, twisted, and rolled into each other. Storms of red ash roared alongside the screaming souls bound to the Necronaught. The bladed locomotive listed forward into the earth and tore the ground apart. Exploding fuel launched the cars forward and flipped them end over end.
The Necronaught careened over the edge and fell into the Carrion Rift. It broke apart in the fall, and plummeted in sections.
The train met its demise at the nadir of the Rift. A series of metallic blasts echoed across the plains, through the mountain peaks, and into the void of the falling night.
Cross runs through ankle-deep icy waters. The canopy of leaves collapses like green snow. Angry wind whips through the trees and bends the freezing rain. The black mountain stands, ever vigilant.
He is in the glade.
In the obelisk.
It must be safe, for us to be here now.
Cross runs towards the clearing. There are shouts ahead. His body is whole, but he feels faint, like he is fading.
He doesn’t have much time.
Cross pushes his way through the icy canopy of trees.
Red is there, and she runs from him. She has found a way out, a way to escape her death on the train by moving through the obelisk. From there she will travel somewhere else, to some other safe exit point back in the physical world.
He knows Red can accomplish this. She has uncovered the secrets of this place, after all. She will doubtless have found a way to break free.
But she runs as if frozen, trapped in the icy flow. Her every step is prolonged, dream-like. She is not meant to be here, and the world in the prison resists her transgression.
Cross closes the distance between them. She sees him, and runs faster. Neither of them can use their spirits here. They are all prisoners in this place.
She will fall up and into the sky, he realizes, just as spirits do when their time is done.
Cross hears thunder, the approaching rumble of hooves. Red speeds her pace.
Cross races toward the witch, even as a shaft of silver light embraces her from above. She holds up her arms, and her body begins to rise. Cross tackles her, and they both fall back to earth. They struggle half submerged in the platinum waters.
They roll and splash in the freezing marsh. He holds on to her tightly, gripping her hair and forcing her face into the water, not even sure if she can drown in this world.
His skin is frozen. He feels himself slipping away, fading. Light pierces his body. He grows translucent.
The unicorns emerge from the trees. Their bloody and jagged horns bear down on the two mages, aimed like a host of lances. Red screams and struggles, but Cross holds her tight.
Meet the wardens of this prison, he tells her without speaking. They protect the last vestige of our power and our hope. They are the guardians of what you wanted to take away from us.
Cross looks to the trees. He sees his spirit there, trapped in this cage with no walls, and she watches him. She waits for him.
He realizes how much he loves her.
The unicorns run both he and Red through. The horns cut straight into their bodies like ugly black blades. Red and Cross are trampled underfoot, their bodies mangled. The silver waters turn red.
They swim in pain. Cross holds on to Red. He will make sure he doesn’t die alone.
Red’s broken body folds. She screams as she is drawn up to the eternal sky. She does not make it far before her form is scattered like a flock of bloody ravens, torn apart as it leaves the safety of the glade.
It didn’t work, the voice of his spirit tells him. He can’t tell if she is near or far. Red has not escaped.
Cross lays on the ground, broken, bleeding and crushed. But he is still there.
He sees his spirit. She emerges from the trees and walks towards him.
I’m sorry. I’m finished. And with me gone, you’ll die, too.
It’s time, she tells him. It’s the way of things. One goes. Another stays. I want to go.
No.
It’s my choice. Not yours.
And so it ends. A unicorn horn pierces her torso from behind, and it punches through her chest. She gasps, and her hands cling to the bloody spike. She looks at Cross, and smiles.
I love you.
A beam of light from above takes hold of her. She is lifted out of the glade and into the silver sky, where she will fall forever in the company of other lost souls.
Cross woke to a cold and cloudy night.
His back ached like he’d been stabbed, and his joints and muscles were sore and stiff. Every last part of him felt heavy, except for his head, which felt stuffed with cotton. But he was whole. The wounds he’d suffered were somehow all gone: the plagued hand, the blade and claw wounds, even the broken leg. All he was left with was fatigue.
A deep chill gripped his skin, and when Cross took a breath he was struck with a fit of coughing that went on for what felt like hours.
Slowly, he sat up, and looked around.
He was in the graveyard.
She sent me home.
The industrial fires of Thornn lit the deep night and turned the clouds to copper. The vastness of the Reach stretched out behind him, a dark and endless field of shadowed frost. Just to his right, dangling from the lonely tree, was the featureless doll he and Snow had seen the last time they’d been there.
It was the last place he and Snow had visite
d together before he’d found out she was to be a part of Viper Squad. Before he found out she’d accompany him on what ended up being her first and only trip away from Thornn.
Cross understood what had happened, even if there was no logical reason why he should have. Somehow, there at the end when he’d used the plague on his hand to detonate the bombs and destroy the Necronaught, his spirit had found him. She’d broken though the walls of her prison in spite of Margrave Azazeth’s power and made it so that he could defeat Red when she tried to escape, right there in that prison of souls.
And then, she sacrificed herself to rescue his body and his soul from doom, and in the process she’d sent him home.
Cross put his arms around himself to fight off the night’s chill. Moments later, he was warm. Something enveloped him – it took him in its spectral hold, and it smothered him in a glaze of unseen energies. He heard incomprehensible whispers, and he sensed a presence there beside himself.
It was a spirit. But it wasn’t her.
Somehow, for reasons he felt sure he’d never fully understand, he’d been given another. He sensed her. She felt entirely alien to him, and he could tell that she was just as uncomfortable as he was. She might have even been the slightest bit resentful towards him, or even hostile, but the bond that had already cleaved them together meant that he had nothing to fear from her, or she from him.
I don’t understand. I’m sorry…you’re stuck here with me, stuck with my pain.
Snow…I’m so sorry. I miss you already. I always will.
For a time, Cross just sat there in the cold and wept. The weight of all he had lost came crashing down, and it almost crushed him. His tears froze in the bitter and uncaring wind.
His spirit tugged at him, impatient. Restless. Somehow familiar.
Could it have been her? Could it have been Snow?
Likely, he could never know. But he could hope.
Whoever his new spirit was, she was with him now, and he hoped that in time he would come to feel for her as he had for the spirit who’d saved his life, who’d been the other half of his soul for almost as long as he could remember.
Blood Skies Page 24
