Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7)

by Steven Montano

  Those images blasted through Cross’s mind with the force of a storm. He screamed, and the darkness shattered and smothered him like a black avalanche, swarming around and into him, filling his mouth and eyes and ears and burying him alive.

  Cross came out of sleep and heard voices. He thought they were human, but it was difficult to tell.

  The light was green and murky, like he floated underwater. Sound tugged at the edge of his mind, creaking metal, groans of motion. The hard steel under his back was unstable.

  He sat up, every muscle aching. He blinked once, twice, tried to clear his eyes enough to see, but everything stayed out of focus. The air tasted like grit and smelled of frost and dust.

  “What the hell...?”

  “You’re on a ship,” a voice said. “But probably not the kind you expect.”

  Cross saw a vague outline, a watery silhouette moving through the murk. He sat up straight, his spine tingling with fear. He couldn’t see what was coming, so he clenched his fists and braced himself for a blow, flinching as the silhouette drew close. Whoever the man was he stayed there, less than a foot away, holding something towards Cross.

  “Take it,” the voice said.

  “What is it?” Cross asked. “No offense, but I can’t see shit.”

  “Lucky for you it isn’t shit,” the voice said. “Hold out your hand, you stubborn bastard.”

  Cross hesitated, then did as he was asked. He was surprised when he felt the familiar hilt of Soulrazor/Avenger in his grip, and a jolt of electric cold shot through his body. He braced himself for the uncomfortable rush of visions and nausea, the vitriolic churning that spread through his gut like sick lightning. To his surprise none of it happened, and after a moment of dizziness and disorientation his sight returned and he found himself holding the black-and-white sword and staring at the man he’d seen in the city, the leader of those underground people. His vision seemed to be back to normal, and though he was still a bit disoriented he no longer felt like his face had been buried in a puddle of sludge.

  “Feel better?” the man asked.

  “That depends,” Cross said. Dizzy or no, in a quick motion Cross stood and put the razor edge of the blade against the man’s throat. His captor was surprised, but didn’t look terribly worried. That doesn’t bode well, Cross thought. “Are you going to tell me what the hell is happening?” he asked.

  “Sure,” the man said, and he turned away. Cross let him go. He noted the arcane aura around the stranger, and now that he had the sword back he sensed something else, a protective resonance with a particular thaumaturgic signature. It was familiar even in its alien-ness, but it took him a moment to recognize it as the same power as that of the blades: Soulrazor, Avenger, Claw and Scar. That power shielded the man, prevented Cross from learning too much.

  Whoever he was, the blonde warlock was still dressed just like all of the others Cross had encountered in the city – green and grey fatigues, a dirty cloak, armor plates on his shoulders, elbows and knees, and a pair of Px4 Storms sat in holsters to his sides.

  “You have one of the swords,” Cross said.

  “Yes and no,” the man answered.

  “Well, that’s cryptic as hell, isn’t it?”

  “I get that sometimes...” the man said with a smile.

  The room was small and stained with rust and soot, some sort of hold or a cabin in the afore-mentioned ship, though there were no portholes or windows to give Cross any idea as to what sort of vessel they were in. Dim bulbs from a swinging lamp in the ceiling bathed the room in jade light, and the buzzing of machines grew loud, then faded.

  “Who are you?” Cross asked.

  “My name is Lucan,” the man said. Cross had to wait for a moment before the significance of the name struck him. “It’s not my only name – recently I’ve been going by Arkus – but I thought you might remember 'Lucan'.”

  “Bullshit,” Cross said. “You’re dead. I saw you die.”

  I think. The memory was vague, from what seemed like a lifetime ago. Lucan Keth had been a prisoner on the Dreadnaught, the Black Scar prison ship Danica Black and her cohort Vos had stolen in order to trade the powerful warlock over to her criminal brother Cradden in exchange for her then lover Lara Cole. Lucan had battled The Sleeper, that aspect of The Black given monstrous form, trapped for ages between worlds only to emerge with a vengeance. From what he, Danica and Kane had witnessed, Lucan had perished in that conflict.

  Cross had discovered that Lucan Keth was just an avatar for the power of the Pale Goddess, a distant entity who battled the vampires. The Goddess had many avatars – Lucan, the Woman in the Ice, Korva of the Revengers, even the White Mother herself. Cross still had no idea who or what this Goddess was supposed to be, but he had a feeling he was about to find out.

  Lucan watched him, and laughed quietly.

  “You’re every bit as disagreeable as your reputation suggests, Cross. Or can I call you Eric?”

  “I’d rather you not call me at all,” Cross said. “So are you going to explain to me what’s happening, or are we going to keep playing guessing games?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know why a guy I saw battle The Black’s errand boy is still walking around,” Cross said. “I want to know why the swords are telling me you have one of their siblings, when you claim not to. I want to know where the hell we are, and where the hell we’re going. And most important...”

  “...you want to know what I want with you,” Lucan said.

  “Now you’re catching on.”

  Lucan smiled and walked towards one of the doors.

  “Come with me,” he said, and without waiting for an answer he opened the door and entered a long hall. Cross hesitated, but followed. The light in the corridor bent and shifted strangely, like the vessel had tilted sideways. The corridor was crafted from dark metal and led to a narrow staircase, which ascended to more murky green light. Cross followed Lucan up the steps and onto a deck lit by swinging thaumaturgic lamps.

  They were on a ship – an airship, though one which moved with subtle motion through the subterranean air of The Ways, vast underground tunnels which connected ancient Crujian structures to places like Black Scar and the tunnels of Voth Raa’morg.

  Chill subterranean winds smelled of burning and frost. The floor was hundreds of feet below and layered with stalactites, while the ceiling was pocked with hundreds of crevices filled with shadows and massive iced webs.

  The deck was wide and clear, devoid of all but a few of Lucan’s wilderness soldiers. The vessel was old and had little cover, so those few on deck used lengths of rope secured to the railing and iron hooks on the floor. Crude rotary guns that looked at least 100 years old swiveled and watched the darkness around them as the ship creaked and groaned its way along the enormous underground tunnel.

  “So how far...” Cross began, but his voice caught in his throat.

  There was something wrong with the walls. What he’d first taken to be curved stone was in fact an unstable sea of darkness, ebbing and bubbling tides of liquid shadow stuff that rippled and bulged like a black ocean. Curls of liquid spat and popped and oozed down to the floor, and before his eyes the surface rippled and eddied. Sinuous shapes moved on the other side, enormous swimmers made of spines and edges. Their bodies twisted and ballooned like blowfish and their teeth were gargantuan rows of oily knives. Those horrors pushed against the walls, which wouldn’t give. Not quite.

  Voices slithered through the air in a soiled tide. Cross heard unintelligible whispers, maddened shrieks, cackles in disturbing mockeries of human laughter. The ebon bodies on the other side of the crumbling shield were vast and dark, colder than the void of space. Fear clenched his insides, and Cross’s already chilled skin felt like it had been splashed with ice water.

  “What the hell...?” he muttered.

  “It’s all right,” Lucan said. He looked apprehensive but not afraid, doubtless having seen this all before. “The barrier will
hold. For a while.”

  “What the hell is it?” Cross asked, but he didn’t need the answer. The Black waited on the other side – the Maloj in their chaotic natural form, a swarm of teeth and hunger, hatred and blight melted into a greasy dark ocean, just waiting for the walls to rupture.

  “The border between worlds,” Lucan said. “We’re beneath Bloodhollow, where the boundary has grown weakest. We don’t have much time, and we’ll need all of the swords to repair the damage.”

  “All of the swords...shit.” Cross watched the brittle walls. The old fear of falling into nothingness was replaced by one of being crushed. Those black walls were pushing in. The darkness would swallow them all. “That means Danica.”

  “And Shiv,” Lucan said. “And me. You see, Cross, Shiv and I combined are the fifth and final sword. I’ve been looking for you for a long time. Because it’s time to end this.”

  NINETEEN

  SHADES

  Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

  Somehow, they’d lived through the night.

  Danica and Raine sat watch at the edge of a low crater surrounded by shattered boulders and snapped saplings still smoking from artillery fire. The purple sky was as swollen and dark as a bruise, cut with streaming black clouds and dark fliers whose shrieks rang loud in the budding dawn. Danica’s armor coat had been all but ruined, leaving her in a dark tank top that did little to combat the cold; her spirit tried his best to help but she held him back, wanting him to save his strength until they got into another fight, which would be soon.

  It had been a hellish night.

  The Doj had led them through fields of smoke and shattered granite monuments. Dracaj had slaughtered all of the other giants, and as Danica and the remnants of the team followed the last into the fog they came across the behemoth husks of dark-skinned warriors with torn skin, dangling intestines and eyes locked open in horror. To their credit the Deep Doj had given as good as they’d received, and several draconian corpses littered the ground, smashed and torn, the greasy green remains smeared across the hard mountain floor.

  Only the smoke had saved them, and Danica knew it was somehow no natural phenomena, though she hadn’t been the one to conjure it. She wondered if the giant hadn’t somehow managed it himself; she’d never heard of a Doj with magical abilities, but she’d be the first to admit she knew little of the enormous race, especially these deep giants who were so adept at staying out of sight. Wherever it came from, the brume concealed their passage up the slope and into the forested foothills where they eventually lost their pursuers, but based on the rapport of hissing calls that sounded through the night the Dracaj had gathered reinforcements for the hunt.

  She heard the reptiles in the darkness. The echoing quality of the sky made it difficult to determine how near or far away they were, but Danica watched for shapes in the green fog, and she expected scaled killers to appear at any moment with their lashing tails and sabre-sized claws. She sat tensed, the G36C held ready, while Raine covered the other side of the low crater. Sticky water dripped down the cracked trees, and snapped twigs and broken scree shifted beneath her boots. Maur tended to Alvarez, who lay wrapped in a blanket, a bandage on his head and his shoulder still bleeding from a shrapnel wound.

  The giant sat quiet, cross-legged at the center of the crater, taking up most of the space. His face-wrap concealed his misshapen face, and his crude battle-armor hung loose off of his massively muscled skin. Dark eyes seemed to stare out at nothing, and he sat impassive, as if meditating.

  This sucks, Danica thought.

  “How is he?” she asked Maur.

  “Not good,” the Gol replied after a moment. Maur’s short red cloak was laden with forest leaves. He lifted a small flask of water to the injured man’s lips. “He needs medical attention. Are you sure your spirit can do nothing?”

  “I can try again,” Danica said. It was strange – while healing had never been her specialty, every witch and warlock’s spirit could do it, but when she’d tried to use thaumaturgy to bind Alvarez’s wounds the man cried out in pain, and instead of recovering more blood just seeped from his injuries and his body started to shake with paroxysms, like he was having a seizure.

  “Don’t,” the Doj spoke, his voice grainy and thick. “He’s been soiled.”

  “Soiled?” Danica said. “How? He was hurt in the crash.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “He’s breathed Dracajian air. He is soiled, and must be taken from this place before he can heal.”

  Danica hesitated. She glanced and Raine and Maur, and saw the same question in their eyes that she held at the edge of her own thoughts.

  “What do you mean by 'Dracajian air'?” she asked. “The fog? We’ve all breathed it...”

  “Yes,” the giant said. “Which is why we must go. We must reach Bloodhollow, before it’s too late.”

  “Then what are we doing waiting around here?” Raine demanded.

  The air was cold, and it was growing colder. Danica balanced herself on the stone-packed slope. The earth was tramped down and stained with blood. Constant sounds issued from all around them, some of them natural, most not. There was no need for a fire, as the forest was alight with strange green illumination, and they feared that igniting a blaze would attract the hunters.

  “They will tire,” the Doj said. “When they do, we leave. Soon.”

  “Great,” Raine said, shaking her head as she wiped a slick sheen of cold sweat from her tattooed neck. She looked at Danica. Her face was severe, her short black hair mottled with forest grime and blast residue. “We were supposed to learn what these guys know and take intel back to Meldoar, not go running around the wilderness getting attacked by snake-men. We don’t have the gear, especially with two people down.”

  “I know,” Danica said, trying not to sound too stern. Raine was a seasoned mercenary, but like the others she lacked a soldier’s discipline. She’d seen plenty of combat but had been in few truly desperate situations, and predictably she was starting to panic, even if she’d never admit it.

  “We don’t have a lot of options,” Maur pointed out. Danica nodded, knowing her old Gol companion would come to her rescue. He was a survivor if ever she’d met one, a man who’d been to hell and back, and worse. She remembered when he and Creasy had been captured and tortured by Ebon Cities shock troops, and the Gol had been so badly injured they’d needed to send him back to Meldoar to get proper medical treatment.

  And then Eric and Ronan and I vanished, and you kept on surviving, fighting the fight when for all you knew the rest of us were dead.

  Most of their comm equipment had been ruined in the crash, and whatever it was that made the “Dracajian air” so toxic also seemed to bear thaumaturgic dampening qualities, as it interfered with Danica’s sending stone. Maur seemed to think he could get a signal out using his short range radio if he could find a power boost, but one would be difficult to come by in the mountains. If they were lucky there might be some salvageable equipment closer to Crucifix Point, but that seemed unlikely, since the place had seen a decade-and-a-half of being ransacked since it’s fall.

  “We have to keep going,” Danica said. “Or we fall back to the tracks and try to return to Meldoar, but that means going right into the heart of those Dracaj.”

  “What the hell are they even doing here?” Raine asked, directing her question to the giant. “I thought their territory was deep in the Loch.”

  “They seek Bloodhollow, as we all do,” the giant said slowly, measuring his words.

  “Jesus,” Raine said. “Whatever’s there must be damn good.”

  Silence. Danica watched the giant carefully, noting how his eyes were locked and his jaw set. Sweat ran down his bald head. He was a hulking creature, towering over the rest of them even in his kneeling position, his abnormally large torso and oddly disfigured head lending him an unreal appearance.

  “It is not what is there,” the giant said at last. “But where it leads.”

  So
me hours later they left the crater and ventured into the soiled night, navigating by dawn’s cold light through the smoke and trees. They moved like shadows, even the giant somehow eerily silent as they shifted through the gloom. The sounds of the Dracaj had gradually faded, leaving the four figures and their unconscious companion alone with the cracking of twigs and the sounds of their own motion to accompany them as the fog gradually lightened, red to grey to white, a roiling mist that churned so thick it might have billowed straight out of a chimney. They paused long enough to chew on dried strips of jerky and drink water; the giant had a bag with large rations, some sort of pre-wrapped headless rodents the size of dogs.

  Danica kept her spirit close, sending him out just far enough to seek danger but not to the point where he’d be difficult to draw back. They saw motifs drawn in the earth, ancient runic symbols Danica didn’t recognize, likely markings made by aboriginal denizens of the forest. Images of vampires and dragons had been carved into the trees, child-like, laughably monstrous in their crude depictions.

  They moved through a cage of wood and stony hills, locked in by brightly colored mist and miles of forest. Cold sweat poured down Danica’s face and her nerves tingled with fear. She expected something to come roaring out of the darkness at any moment, a scaled hunter or a vampire warship, a vagrant Bloodcat or Bloodwolf or some new horror. The world was vast and full of terrors, and even with as much as she’d seen Danica knew there were many nightmares she’d never encountered. It wasn’t an encouraging thought.

  The giant stayed at the rear of the group, limber and silent in spite of his great bulk. His black skin was stark in the growing daylight. A great hammer was slung behind his back, easily the size of a small tree, and his cloth wrap dangled loose from his wide jaw, which the daylight revealed was oversized and odd-shaped like he was deformed. His eyes were cold and he moved with a determined gait, a single-minded motion that made it so no one wanted to pause.

  They were going to find Bloodhollow. If the prophets and portents were correct then whoever controlled the city could possibly end the war, even if no one understood why. The place had been a myth, it seemed, a fable. Few had even heard of it before a few weeks ago, around the time when Danica and Cross had returned from their exile in Nezzek’duul, and she didn’t believe for a moment that was a coincidence. Now the bitter race was on.