In the distance, the city explodes.
Cross fell backwards, and blacked out.
He was back in Thornn.
The vaulted halls of the massive hospital were made from blocks of enhanced sandstone. Everything was drenched in shadow. Cold echoes reverberated down the wide halls. He heard the hum of medical equipment and the moans of the wounded.
Cross looked around the hospital chamber. There were easily thirty beds in the cold room. A chandelier covered with iron spikes and cold candles hung far overhead. Stone columns stood between the rows of canopy-covered beds. Cross smelled disinfectant and blood, body fluids and hex fumes. He tasted iodine and salt. His eyes were heavy and dull, and his stomach felt like it was filled with lead.
He tried to sit up, and he inadvertently almost pulled the IV stand into his lap. A nurse – he couldn’t remember her name, even though he’d seen her a dozen times before – came over and gently pushed him back into a laying position.
“Just relax,” she said. She had a bit of a southerly accent, marking her as a resident of the Ebonsand Coast. “You’re all right.” Her hair was dark and held back in a bun, and she had just the slightest makings of crow’s feet around her eyes.
“How long?” he asked. His voice was cracked and hoarse. He felt like he hadn’t had water in weeks.
“About two days.”
“My team?”
“They’re fine,” Rikeman said. Cross heard the squeak of metal as Phil Rikeman, the Southern Claw’s head surgeon in Thornn, limped over to his bed. Rikeman had a chiseled frame, dark hair, and a commanding voice that made him sound like he should have been broadcasting for the radio network. Rikeman also wore a thaumaturgic leg brace that restrained a deadly necrotic disease and kept it from devouring the rest of his body. Cross had always respected the man, especially after he’d acquired a similar disease a few years back, one that had ultimately saved his own life, but not without irreparable consequences.
It killed my sister. I killed my sister.
“Your team is fine,” Rikeman said. “You, however, are a mess.”
“What happened?”
“Well…you tell me. Kane said something about you falling into a vat of…” Rikeman consulted Cross’ chart, which dangled at the foot of the bed. “‘Nasty vampire black goo, or some shit like that’. That’s a direct quote, of course.” Rikeman laughed. “I think Kane could use some elocution lessons.”
“Well, what happened?” Cross laughed.
“We pumped your stomach and gave you fresh blood. We weren’t sure what we were dealing with, so we gave you the same basic treatment as we do for any vampiric infection. That was two days ago, and you seem fine now.”
“The rest of the team is ok?”
“Yes, Eric…they’re fine.” Rikeman smiled, and shook his head. He’d known Cross and Snow ever since they were old enough to enter the service. More than probably anyone else, he understood what Cross had lost when his sister had died. “They’re fine. I’m sure Pike will want to debrief you.”
“Nice of you guys to put us up.”
“We treat our mercenaries well, I suppose,” Rikeman laughed.
Cross rested after that. He had trouble staying conscious. After he ate some rye toast and a soft-boiled egg, he fell back into a deep sleep.
He dreamed that he floated on black waters through ruins of dark stone. A woman whose face he couldn’t see waited for him there. When he woke, Cross was terribly afraid.
FIVE
GHOSTS
Cross was still in the hospital two days later, in spite of his protests and despite the fact that his wounds healed quickly once his spirit recovered. He still had trouble sleeping, but he tried to keep that to himself.
He didn’t tell anyone about the dreams.
Black was also in the ward. She was being treated for the gunshot wound she’d received in her shoulder, and she stopped by and said hello on the first day after Cross woke up. She moved awkwardly with a cast on her arm, but Cross joked that she managed to make it look stylish. Danica laughed.
Even banged up and bruised, Danica’s thick red hair shone in the harsh sunlight that crept in through the arched windows in the medical wing, and her skin looked perfect.
Cross still imagined what it would be like to be with her, sometimes…to be with anyone, really, to have some sort of meaningful and lasting romantic relationship, and more often than not he imagined that relationship would be with Danica.
Cross knew that fantasy wasn’t healthy for a number of reasons. For starters, she was a lesbian. Second, she still nursed a broken heart from when her last lover, Lara Cole, had left her nearly two years before. Third, developing any sort of intimate relationships inside the ranks of the team was bound to end in trouble. Fourth, she sometimes reminded him of Ilfesa Warfield, a black marketer and smuggler whom he’d had an incurable and lustful crush on for almost four years, but who he was too afraid to approach because, in his mind, there was no way it would end well.
He wasn’t meant for relationships. He hadn’t even been a good brother, and he couldn’t imagine he’d be any better as a lover, or, heaven forbid, a husband.
“How are they treating you?” she asked. Her voice was coarse, and sounded huskier than normal.
“Decent enough, I suppose. You look good.”
“Clean exit,” she said. “My spirit should have it healed up in the next day or so.”
“I was referring to the hospital gown,” Cross smiled. “It’s fetching.”
Black smiled.
God, she’s beautiful.
“So what happened to you, exactly?” Black asked him after a moment.
A soldier moaned a few beds away. Cross had heard him before – necrotic worms had worked into his flesh, and even though Rikeman had dug them all out after a painful surgery, the young man’s mind had been infected with nightmares that he would never escape from. When he slept, he was wracked with terrifying dreams, and when he was awake he thought that everyone he looked at was bleeding from their eyes.
“I fell into that…sludge,” Cross said.
“Any idea what that stuff was?”
“I was sort of hoping that cylinder would tell us.”
“Tell them,” Black corrected. “Pike and Laros and whoever else is in charge. You’re not Southern Claw any more, Eric.”
“Right,” he nodded. He could’ve been, but he’d made a choice. They all had.
“Nurse!” a soldier called out from a few beds away. His eyes were solid black, the result of some arcane-chemical weapon used on him on the front lines. “Nurse, please!” Rikeman and a pair of nurses appeared, though there was truthfully little they could do without removing the young man’s eyes. Ultimately, that was probably what had to happen.
The Ebon Cities war labs had gotten more creative ever since they’d decided to pull out all of the stops and launch a brutal campaign against Thornn.
“So who was that woman in the Spire?” Cross asked Black.
“What?” she said, clearly surprised.
“Come on, Danica. You know her."
Black looked him straight in the eye. She could make her gaze go as cold as ice, and she could stare almost anyone down.
She can still stare me down, Cross thought. I might feel a bit more like a leader if she didn't have such an easy time doing that to me.
“The staring thing tells me I'm right,” he said with a smile. “But the silent treatment usually means that you want to kill something…so hopefully I'm wrong about that one.”
Danica laughed.
“You know me too well,” she said quietly. She didn't seem to like admitting that.
Rikeman’s staff had sedated the young man with the black eyes. Nearby, another soldier moaned that his leg hurt. No one had the heart to tell him that both of his legs were gone.
“Is she a Revenger?” Cross asked.
“Do you ever know when to quit?” Black said with an irritated shake of her head.
&n
bsp; “I have a feeling that Pike is going to ask you these questions,” Cross shrugged. “It's easier for me to be on your side if I actually know what the hell is going on.”
Their relationship, such as it was, had started on shaky grounds. Even though they'd agreed to help one another and join forces to rescue Black's then-girlfriend Cole from captivity, Danica had withheld information from Cross right from the start.
The fact that she was also responsible for the death of a good-hearted Southern Claw ranger named Jamal Dillon hadn't done much for Cross and Black’s partnership, but over the past two years he’d gradually learned to trust her, just as she, in turn, had done everything she could to make it so that she could be trusted.
That meant she no longer lied to him, but there were still plenty of times when she kept him out of the loop.
“She's not a Revenger,” Black said quietly. “Not anymore.”
“What…she went rogue?”
“You could say that,” Black say bitterly. “She conducted secret operations without the consent of the High Wardens.”
Danica sat down on the edge of the bed next to Cross’. The soldier who slept there had been out for hours, and Cross wasn't entirely convinced that the older man hadn't lapsed into some sort of coma. Cross, for his part, shifted in his place. He was thoroughly tired of sitting, but he was still too weak to do much of anything else.
His spirit stayed close and warm against his chest. She and Danica's aggressively male spirit had never been able to much bear one another's company, but with practice both mages had gotten better at keeping the spectral tempers from flaring, and now the two spirits just tended to ignore each other altogether.
Danica and I really are like friggin’ parents sometimes.
“What kind of ‘secret operations’?” he asked. It must have been something either very profitable or incredibly unsavory for Korva to intentionally obscure her activities. The Wardens of Black Scar were, by their nature, a band of insidious and cutthroat mercenaries, and Cross couldn’t think of much they wouldn’t approve of, unless it was something dangerous to the rest of their organization.
“Honestly, I'm not sure,” Danica said. “But I know that it involved taking prisoners out into the wilderness and forcing them to dig up old vampires.”
Cross nodded, thought about what she'd said, and shook his head.
“Wait...what? Digging up old vampires?”
“Hey, I wasn't there,” Black said.
“No, but my sister was,” Kane said. He walked into the medical wing from out of nowhere, dressed in grey work clothes and a heavy armor coat, with a Valmet M78 in one hand a small bundle of carnations in the other.
“Aww, Mike,” Danica said. “You shouldn't have.”
“They're for Cross,” he said.
“I'm more of a roses guy,” Cross said. “What was that about your sister? I didn't know you had...”
“She's dead,” Kane said shortly. “Korva killed her at one of those dig sites.”
Black lowered her gaze.
“Korva killed a lot of people on those digs, directly or otherwise. I lost a couple of good friends on her last dig. The one...” She looked up at Kane, but his eyes stared straight ahead, focused on some memory.
Cross knew that look all too well. He'd seen it in the mirror more times than he could count. Almost four years had passed since he'd lost his own sister, Snow. The pain wasn't as constant now as it had once been, but it was still there. Some days the pain was as fresh as the day she’d died.
“I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I had no idea.”
Kane shrugged, and smiled weakly.
“I'm going to get that bitch,” he said. “And that pile of dogshit Jennar, too. Man, I'm booked!” he laughed. His voice was coarse, and Cross saw him shake. “I still wake up sometimes,” he said quietly, “and reach out for Ekko, like she’s still there in bed next to me.” He smiled, painfully. His eyes burned into the floor. “Shit.”
“If there's anything you need...” Black said.
“Yes,” Kane said, regaining some of his composure. “Get your asses out of bed by tomorrow. Pike and Laros want to meet with us.”
“Jesus, already?” Cross groaned.
“Poor baby,” Black laughed.
Cross watched Kane. The big man had shrugged his moment of vulnerability off, at least on the outside.
He’s living for revenge, Cross thought. We have to help him. That will only keep him going for so long.
“I’m off to get some food,” Black said. “Anyone care for some meat?”
“That’s sort of a personal question,” Kane said with a grin.
“Moron.”
“You two enjoy,” Cross said. “I need to get some sleep.”
He caught Danica’s eye before she and Kane left, and he tried to signal to her to keep an eye on Kane. Black seemed to understand, and she nodded. Kane wasn’t the sort of man who accepted help, or friends, easily. If he knew they were worried about him he was likely just to seal himself off even more.
You’re not alone, Cross wanted to tell him, and he still would later if he thought it would help. We’ve all lost someone. We can’t forget them…but we can’t let our memories of them drag us down.
Cross closed his eyes. He saw Snow, burning on the train.
He missed Graves, and Dillon, and so many others, but it was the memory of his sister that haunted his sleep even years after she’d died. Cross felt his breaths catch in his chest, and he started to shake.
When he opened his eyes a short time later, Black and Kane had gone.
Good. I don’t want them to see me like this.
Cross sat quietly, and cried. He choked down his tears so that no one would hear him.
He sees the keep on the edge of the ocean. White waves rock the small boat as he desperately holds on for his life. The air is dark and violent and filled with cobalt storms, and the rain falls like knives. Streaks of dark lighting scar the sky.
The keep is a crumbling ruin, a bastion of decaying mortar and rotting beams. Chunks of loose granite plummet into the water. The tower is cracked and open, and the inside of the keep is exposed to the waters.
The ship sails into the ruins.
Dark shapes move in the deeps, silhouettes of drowning people that grasp and struggle for the surface.
He senses a presence in the dark, lost somewhere in the shadows. He sees flashes of eyes and teeth.
The woman is there, at the far end of the open keep, waiting on the shore. She is wreathed in grey shadows that flow around her body like clouds of steam.
He cannot see her face, and yet feels that he knows her. Her eyes are pinpricks of light in the watery gloom.
The ship slowly chops its way toward her. A sense of dread grows in his chest and holds there, like some gritty substance he’s been forced to choke down.
The waters are violent and the walls loom close, and he knows that at any moment he will be dashed against the stone, where he will sink and drown in the company of lost souls.
Cross woke. He still saw the woman in his mind's eye, a vivid shadow with hazy diamond eyes. He shook himself to, and the image was gone.
His head pounded, and his lips and throat burned with dehydration. Cross reached for the decanter of water on the stand next to his hospital bed, only to find that it wasn't there.
He looked around the hospital wing, which was a vast and open space crowded with sandstone pillars and hospital beds. It was deep in the night, and the only reason Cross could even see his own hand in front of his face was because of the ambient glow of the flames that penetrated the mists from the watchtowers outside.
The walls hummed with hex currents and bioelectric wires. Thin fog curled against the reinforced windows, and the air was cold and still. Cross smelled disinfectant and body scent.
Something felt wrong. Like the air itself had frozen.
Cross looked around. The other patients all seemed to be asleep. Someone was usually being tended t
o by a nurse or one of the doctors on Rikeman's staff, but just then everything was utterly quiet. Only the sound of warships passing by overhead broke the silence.
He wanted something to drink, but he didn't want to wake everyone in the hospital wing calling out for a nurse, so Cross licked his lips, popped the muscles in his neck, and slowly stood up.
The stone floor was deathly cold, and it took some effort for Cross not to gasp at its touch. He considered living without the water before he saw something move out of the corner of his eye.
Whoever it was kept to the shadows, and they moved in and out of sight behind the nearest pillar. Cross' spirit coiled around him. She was like an electric current that covered his skin in a burning glaze. Her excited state gave him a rush of energy that he badly needed, as his body was entirely drained of strength, like every muscle had turned gelatinous.
Cross carefully stepped around his bed and moved towards the pillar. His bare feet were silent on the stone. He’d made it most of the way before he realized he wasn’t wearing his implement gauntlet: it would be impossible for him to channel his spirit without immolating them both.
Shit!
Unarmed, Cross stepped closer. A woman stood half-concealed behind the pillar. He couldn’t make out any of her features, like she was nothing more than a silhouette. She wasn’t really trying to hide her presence, but she kept herself out of plain sight so that he couldn’t see her clearly. By her shape it almost might have been Danica, but this woman was too tall.
“Hello?” Cross said. His voice rang like cannons in the still air.
“Hello, Cross,” she said. He knew that voice, but couldn't place it.
The air went brittle and hard. He stared into her eyes and
he sees the trees. The sky is dark and cold and filled with shadows that loom like giants.
He sees the women in the glade. Their pale flesh is moist, and their gossamer dresses cling to their thin bodies.
Black unicorns descend and tear through the forest with their razor horns. Their approach shakes the trees and brings down the leaves in an avalanche of purple and red. Black rain falls, and the water smells of death.
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