The woman’s body convulsed and tightened around the blade. Shadows pulsed up her arms. He smelled cold, a glacial stench like blood-stained ice.
The dead and dying were everywhere, crying out and writhing in pain as the sun rose gold. Cross pulled his armor coat tight to shield against the sullen chill. Storm clouds to the north clung ominously to the hills, stained charcoal fog which roiled with electrical currents.
Cross moved through the wreckage, using his blade to finish off the wounded before they could become undead. A prickle rose across his flesh, a dreadful sense that he was out of place.
“There’s no cure,” he’d say sometimes from behind his cowled mask, remembering all of the people he’d lost, people who’d meant something to him.
He was no expert with a blade, but the sword made him proficient. In his hands it was a deadly weapon, and over the years it had become clear that the swords were meant for him, that they had chosen him. The artifact moved with precision, cutting through hearts and ensuring quick deaths.
The battle raged outside. Vampire warships had deposited the payloads while Razorwings ripped sentries off the walls, providing cover for the Bloodcrests as they launched through the gates; molten spines and fiery breath melted the stone walls while their reptilian maws tore Night’s soldiers to pieces.
Bullet fire and explosive blasts circled the city as Cross hacked through dying citizens. It was bloody work, and after just a few minutes he was soaked to his arms. The black chasm of the sky stretched out above, filled with vertical pools of light. Pockets of smoke drifted between the ruined buildings. He glimpsed back and saw the end of the devastation, reinforced inner walls erected by Fane’s war mages just in time to stop the flow of necrotic fire from sweeping through the city and wiping out Raven Company. The stench of sulfur and ash filled Cross’s nose and made him gag, and for some reason it bothered him worse than the smell of burned skin and blistered bodies.
“Cross!”
He recognized Wulf’s voice and smelled the stench of his thaumaturgic armor. The commander of Fane strode across the courtyard with his snake-skin cape and iron skullcap, his dark blue and black armor and massive cloak. The man was the size of a barn, and though he claimed to have no Doj heritage Cross found that difficult to believe. His eyes were clear and clean, tinted jade and olive, and his stony jaw was perpetually covered with the shade of a five-o-clock shadow. He was easily three or four inches taller than Cross, and as he drew close his broad frame eclipsed sight of the bloody sky and stone-colored clouds. Two of Wulf’s enforcers were close-by, similarly iron-jawed and dark-clad men with short blades and grenade launchers mounted on their M-16s.
“Last I checked,” Cross said.
“Smartass,” Wulf growled. The man didn’t speak so much as bark, and though he had the countenance of a gargoyle and the personality of a bull he’d used his cunning to line his pockets with Fane’s gold.
“My ass is the smartest part of my body,” Cross said as he stared up into the big man’s face. “What do you want?”
“I need your brilliant mind,” Wulf said. “As well as that magic blade.”
“Of course,” Cross said with a cold smile. “Good to know I’m still needed.”
Wulf barked a laugh and shrugged his massive shoulders.
“Don’t worry. I’ll let you know when you aren’t.”
Cross met Wulf’s eyes, and smiled.
“I don’t doubt that at all.”
Wulf glared back. Thin scars ran away from the edges of his eyes like bloodied crow’s feet. His skin was burnished, almost like copper.
“I have a job for you,” Wulf said. “Report to Hasker. Now.”
Cross sighed. Wulf held his gaze for a moment more and then was gone, stomping through the remains on the field and back towards his bivouac near the center of the city.
Grisly smoke poured up from that butcher’s yard as Cross navigated his way around the east end of Night to the heavily fortified Razor Gates. He felt a rancid breeze pass over him, and watched as the sunlight swept over the field of dead. They were burning the bodies after they’d been shot or stabbed, and the smoke from the flames filled the air like a fog.
Hasker stood alone before the massive gate, the pale ground a stark contrast to the onyx walls and slivers of sharpened steel looming up above. The gate was like a vortex of teeth, a whirlwind of sharp edges designed to rip anything that attempted to pass through it to pieces. Only a few of the Razor Gates had been constructed, a marvel of Fane’s war engineers, and the east location was the only one in Night. Hasker was a small man, with a thin antelope-like neck and bulging eyes, pale skin and veins on his face that looked like a road-map. His mouth was small and fine and always twisted in disapproval, and his dark armor bore armored shoulder-plates and wrist-guards.
“Cross,” he said as Eric drew close. “Nice of you to join me.”
“It sounded like slightly more fun than jumping into a pool of acid,” Cross said. “Though I’m sure you’ll say something to make me reconsider.”
“You’ll need the swords,” Hasker said after he gave Cross a slim smile. “We have a live one coming in.”
Cross breathed deep. He didn’t want to do this anymore, at times felt he couldn’t.
But you have to, he reminded himself. Danica’s life depends on it. Even if she doesn’t know it.
He slid Soulrazor/Avenger from its sheath and held it ready. The ring of meteor steel rang through the crisp morning air, and the double-blade was heavy in his hands. His fingers went white clenching the hilt.
The weapon was cold, not responding, as it rarely did when called upon. Cross had discovered one thing that always seemed to activate the artifact blade’s powers: putting himself in danger. The weapon had a purpose, and fulfilling that purpose depended on its wielder’s survival. For better or worse Cross was stuck with the joined swords, and to date every time his life had been seriously threatened the intelligent blades had come to his rescue.
How long will they keep it up? he wondered. How long before they decide I’m not worth it, that there’s some other fool out there who can carry them into their final battle?
He thought of Danica, felt her cool breath on his neck, the smooth skin of her belly against his hand. Even the lick and whir of her golem arm was a sweet memory, a reminder she was close. Deep red hair spilling across his face, tickling him, her breasts pressed against his naked chest.
Their old life was over, and this new one was more frightening than anything he’d ever known.
“Ready,” Hasker said.
Three Raza came through the Razor Gate on a tide of bitter wind. Their vampire captive was with them.
It had been unheard of in Cross’s days as a Hunter. Vampires would never surrender, and no means had ever been devised that could force them into submission. The undead knew no fear, and the necrotic energies required to exercise control over them were a mystery to the Southern Claw, even with all of the data and information gathered in the Tome of Scars.
But Fane worked with Koth, having joined forces against their common enemy, the vampires of the Ebon Cities. The Coalition granted Koth military technology and a substantial expanse of territory in the southeastern regions, and in return the undead had given Wulf twisted and vile magical secrets of how to better control and create undead.
The trio of Raza’s black cloaks swirled, a frenzy of bladed ravens. Energy dripped from their bodies like putrescent honey. They looked straight at him, faces and eyes unmoving, while they floated there like candles on a black lake.
Behind them was their prize – a torrent of spirit energies, mad ghosts twisted into a maelstrom of misplaced stars that moved with muscular force. A mist river circled around a humanoid figure at its epicenter, a dark silhouette with broad shoulders, long hair and spined arms, talons for fingers and fangs for teeth. The creature was calm, unmoving in the nexus of that silent storm. The vampire.
“Proceed,” Hasker told Cross. “This vampire know
s where our target is.”
Cross smiled grimly to himself. Soulrazor/Avenger had many talents. Some he’d discovered only by accident.
I always knew I was special, Cross thought bitterly. He was the only warlock to have ever had a spirit stripped away and then somehow regained her, the only warlock to have been taken captive by his own arcane ghost and later freed from the bonds of magic without dying in the process. He’d glimpsed inside the Obelisk of Dreams, that soul prison created when humankind first learned to wield magic, and he’d been reborn and released from its confines when he should have died.
For the longest time he hadn’t known what it all meant, why he’d been allowed to see these things, to experience these things, when no one else had. Now he did.
To do this bastard’s dirty work.
He held the blade aloft and locked his eyes on the bubble. He’d glimpsed into the vampire collective consciousness before, but never willingly. Not until he discovered how to do it with the swords.
Cross took a breath and stepped into the fold. Oily power slithered across his face and body. He tasted rancid skin, felt burning. His body passed into a void so utterly cold it was like falling into the heart of a glacier.
The voices collapsed around him, sliced through his mind.
Slick slick sick cut throttle we will kill you once kill you again you can’t escape you’ve always been with us we know you take you pull your insides out and feast on what is left come to us now and let us suck the flesh from your bones
He sees the city. It is lost now, a forlorn shell against a bitter red sky. He sees salt rivers and bone monoliths, burning villages and barges piled high with skulls. Cold vapors curl up from the bleeding walls and paint the sky with bitter smoke.
It is a city of the dead.
Once it was his home. He protected it, fought to keep it and its people safe. All of it is lost now, just another failure. He sees the faces of those he’s lost, all of the people he tried to protect but couldn’t. Snow and Graves, Dillon and Kane, Ash and Grissom, Creasy and Ankharra, faces in the smoke, melting masks in the tides of frozen mist.
They call to him, and all he can do is listen to them scream.
He pressed on, through memories and ethereal claws, cold voices and blood-soaked tongues. Images flashed through his mind: cartilage cities and cobalt towers, pale dancers on the vampire shores, the Grim Father’s beastly visage towering over lanes packed with the bladed dead. The swords protected him, hid him deep within so he could keep going, deeper into the nightmare, until he found what Wulf sought.
The location of Bloodhollow. Humanity’s last hope.
SIX
frost
Year 35 A.B. (After the Black)
10 A.S.C. (After Southern Claw)
He walked through a high plains desert. Traces of soiled snow colored the limestone and sharply crested buttes. The air was freezing, and icy wind made dour with the odor of dying animals sliced through his armor and cloak. Dead trees like broken daggers provided cover for wastelands scavengers, odd reptilian bovines with slathering jaws and coats of mirrored scales.
Ancient turbines – long abandoned thaumaturgic engines resembling towers capped with rusting rotary blades – stood like burned sentinels on steep hills of loosened stone and shale. Occasional gusts of strong wind twisted the decaying fans to life and filled the air with a dull and ghostly groan.
He watched the towers with a wary eye. Sometimes they housed squatters and refugees, and sometimes they held things much, much worse.
Ice crunched underfoot. The stones on the plains were like wounds, boils of ice around hardened rock and shell. He’d passed the remains of several gutted villages, all that was left of what had once been the wolf-hunting communities, places populated by people who’d made a conscious decision to escape the city-states.
Nobody escapes. Not now, and not ever.
The drifter walked across the tundra, his blade sheathed behind his back and firearms concealed beneath his tattered cloak. His cowl kept his face shielded from the biting cold, and his eyes were as dead as steel.
Ronan moved at a slow and deliberate pace. He could have entered the Deadlands to increase his pace but that took its toll, and he wasn’t as young as he used to be.
Frost covered the ground, coating the remnants of old vehicles and sheets of corrugated tin fallen from ruined villages. Towers of black lead peeked up from beneath mounds of ash smothered across the landscape. Everything tasted like sour ice.
He marched through trenches whenever he could so as to escape the brutal wind, passed through sheared beds of rock where bones and metal ruins lie buried in the strata. The deeper he walked, the more bones he found – hundreds from the hunting communities had been killed, and thousands more followed when the Ebon Cities wiped out Seraph’s refugees.
Ronan and the rest of the team should have been there, but they’d been half a world away when the vampires gained the upper-hand, struggling for their lives against a bunch of ghosts and trying to hunt down a shadow wolf sorcerer who’d nearly killed every last one of them.
He still wasn’t sure exactly sure how it was the Ebon Cities had finally routed the Southern Claw. No one did. Before anyone knew what was happening Thornn had fallen, and within a week Seraph followed. Ath was the last holdout, having become the new temporary headquarters for the Southern Claw as soon as Fane’s assault had begun, but even that city could put up only so much resistance against the onslaught of the vampire armies when resources had already been spread thin dealing with Wulf’s incursion from the east.
Dumb fuck didn’t care that his greedy bullshit was destroying the human race. They never did. Ronan had killed the worst sorts of men, and one thing they always had in common was that they never saw themselves in the wrong, never considered their actions evil even as they trod the innocent beneath their feet.
That’s the difference between me and them. I know what a bastard I am. I know I’ll pay for all of the things I’ve done.
I’m paying for them now.
He came upon the camp near dusk. Ronan had marched all through the day, protecting his skin from the ashen desert clime and his eyes from the low winter sun. He’d walked through forests of petrified cacti and shallow riverbeds filled with lime. He saw shacks and abandoned grain silos in the distance, just metal ghosts in the freezing wind. His boots felt frozen to his feet and his cowl was crusted against his scarred face. Ronan’s cloak fluttered in the icy wind like the wings of a midnight bird.
The hills rolled, sometimes gently, sometimes steep. Cracked stones like snapped-off teeth stood at the old borders of villages or territories, and he crossed the remnants of concertina barricades and spilled sandbags from ruined outposts.
The refugees he sought had found a watchtower still largely intact, a steel and stone column atop a crested hill. Scrub and stones provided cover for his approach; he navigated through a labyrinth of low ravines filled with dust and scuttling crab spiders.
Ronan found position where he could lay prone, concealed by a low thicket of brambles and frozen thorns. He watched, and used the scope of his H&K G3SG/1 to scout the area, ready to shut the sight guard if he saw anyone looking in his direction so he could prevent any sun or snow glare from reflecting off the lens and giving away his position. His muscles were stiff and his eyes gummy, but Ronan had been through worse. He was in his early forties, but he was still capable of things most men half his age couldn’t dream of doing, even if it was getting more and more difficult for him to shift his mind and body to the cold realm called the Deadlands, that dark place where he was capable of pushing himself to the point where he didn’t feel pain, where he didn’t feel anything.
Going there wasn’t the problem, and never really had been. It was coming back.
He spied a sentry walking a perimeter around the tower, and after a moment he saw a woman, a spotter, carefully hidden up top. Ronan snapped his lens shut and waited until she shifted back out of sight before he flipped th
e scope open again.
Ronan worked to gather his information before the sun set, when he knew the self-proclaimed Black Ice Marauders would emerge from their lair and begin the night’s hunt. The tower had only one entrance, a solid iron door doubtlessly bolted shut from the inside, and the entire gang would hold up in there until it was time for them to emerge; the scattered tents and sandbags around the tower’s base held some of their mundane equipment and concealed the bladed snowmobiles they used to raid borderlands settlements.
You freaks are worse than the vampires, Ronan thought, and he smiled. It was going to be a pleasure collecting the bounty on Rage and his crew, especially since they’d elevated from snatch-and-grab equipment and munitions raids to kidnappings and rapes.
Ronan clenched his fists, kept the blood flowing. It would be time to move soon.
The sun set like blood. Darkness and shadows crept across the pale white landscape. Ronan clenched his teeth against the cold and held himself perfectly still in his prone position, the rifle held tight as he peered through the scope. The wind grew colder, and a bone moon rose. Frost and ice blew across the ground.
Ronan breathed deep. He didn’t want to enter the Deadlands, not until he had to. He could deal with the cold, could deal with the cramps and discomfort. As a child he’d been tortured, exiled to the desert and left to fend for himself with nothing but the clothes on his back, sent to kill other children and rape young girls, ordered to hunt down deadly predators and not return to the Crimson Triangle’s monasteries empty handed.
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 9
