Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7)

by Steven Montano

  Lucan watched him carefully.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Maur, I can do that. And I’ll have you know, you’re not the first Gol to make that request of me.”

  “Good,” Maur said after a moment, sounding more like his old self. “Maur would hate to think he is the only member of his race with any brains.”

  They all laughed over that, albeit briefly.

  “Lucan,” Cross said. “You said we have to go and get Shiv...what did you mean?”

  “The walls are weak here,” he said. “Remember the glimpse of the barrier to The Black you and I saw before?”

  Danica looked at Cross with an alarmed expression.

  “Don’t worry about it...” he said.

  “Like hell,” she answered.

  “There are ways through,” Lucan continued, ignoring them. “But we have to tread carefully. Push too hard and we risk tearing the other weak points in the fold, where the barriers between realities are already tenuous, like fabric drawn too taut. We can’t just pass through and wander into other times or realities without doing significant damage – we can go only short distances, or else allow things on the other side to come to us. So long as they don’t venture beyond Bloodhollow, the damage will be minimal.”

  “Ok...” Cross said with a nod.

  “Translation?” Danica demanded.

  “We have to wait,” Lucan said. “But not for long. And I was misleading you when I said we had to go and get them, because in reality we only have to go and fetch Shiv. Ronan will come to us.”

  “Wait, what...?” Danica began, but a sudden clamor rose outside as Bloodhollow’s citizens rushed to their posts. A general alarm went up, a clanging bell that echoed through the massive cavern. They heard the sound of gunfire off in the distance, followed by small explosions and the groan of vehicles.

  “Shit,” Cross said. “Is that...?”

  “The Coalition,” Lucan said. “They’re early.”

  “Well, we need to get out there...”

  “Ronan is almost here,” Lucan said. “Cross, I’ll need you to help me with him. If the rest of you would be kind enough to go and repel the borders.”

  Without another word Lucan moved past them and left the room. Cross looked at her. Danica watched Lucan go, then grabbed Cross by the collar and pulled his close, pushing their lips together.

  “Come back,” she said.

  “You, too,” he answered.

  “Tell Ronan Maur says 'Hello',” the Gol said.

  “Danica...” Cross said.

  “I know,” she said. “Me, too.” She grabbed him and pulled him close. “We’ll have a life after this,” she said, fighting the tears she felt in her eyes, hating herself for feeling weak. “There’s a place for us, you know,” she said. “Somewhere without blood skies and vampires. A place where we can be together.”

  “You’re everything to me,” he said.

  She held him a moment longer, and turned away. They both went without looking back, Cross following Lucan deeper into the underground city, Danica following Maur to a wide bridge that was under attack.

  Bloodhollow’s size and breadth continued to dizzy her as they raced across what felt like miles of red stone road. The structures shifted because of a tremor, and each gunshot and blast echoed loud in the caves. Everywhere they turned the ragged citizens of Bloodhollow readied weapons and dug in, taking position in the ruined cracks of tall crimson spires or behind sandbags, in the clefts of buildings or natural rips in the road where some past subterranean calamity had separated the floor.

  They came to the bridge, which was as wide as a city block and two hundred yards across, thick red stone with crumbling rails. The ceiling was taller there, and beneath the bridge lay a distant gorge filled with crystalline waters and edged stones aimed up like stakes. The roar of the underground river was suddenly deafening; Danica hadn’t even heard it until she and Maur drew to within a dozen feet of the edge of the bridge.

  Thick curls of smoke followed three vehicles as they rolled across the bridge: bastard things, part truck and part tank, with turrets weighed down by 20mm cannons and miniguns, razored battering rams and spiked wheels. Gargoyles, Troj and human soldiers followed behind the mechanized armor, accompanied by a single Raza witch drifting up high on underground winds, her body sheathed in a corona of black fire.

  “Can we blow the bridge?” Danica asked one of the men, a bearded and dirty-faced soldier dressed in fatigues and armed with an AK-47.

  “We thought so,” he said angrily. “That monk-witch thing disabled all of the explosives we wired.”

  “Shit,” Danica said. “Do we have RPGs?”

  “A few. Not enough to bring the bridge down.”

  “Target the trucks, then,” Danica said. “I’ll handle the bridge.”

  Maur moved next to her. He wore a bandolier and carried an M203 grenade launcher, which he cranked open and loaded as the two of them moved to the edge of the bridge. There was no barrier between the city grounds and the rift below, but a line of sandbags reinforced with toppled steel girders and concrete slabs blocked the way to the bridge itself, and a half-dozen of Lucan’s troops were there with assault rifles and two of the afore-mentioned RPGs while the rest of Bloodhollow’s defenders dug in further back. Danica looked across the bridge to try and get a better view of what waited beyond the Coalition forces, but all she saw was a fog of black shadow.

  The air turned cold and bitter. The tainted smell of hex rolled across the bridge ahead of the Coalition vehicles as they advanced. A shot rang out from one of the turrets and shattered a building behind them with a high-pitched sonic scream that made Danica’s eardrums feel like someone had jabbed them with needles. Gunfire echoed, flashes of white in the growing dark. The thick black cloud on the other side of the bridge gained speed and momentum, flowing fast like it rolled off a sea.

  “Spread out!” she yelled, and she turned the controls in her arm, releasing the full strength of her spirit who’d patiently waited, pent up and boiling with rage and war lust. He licked around her skin, hot and sharp, then darted away with such ripping force she feared he’d tear her along behind her. Danica reigned him in just enough to keep him from being overexposed.

  He and the Raza’s male spirit sensed one another, roiling phantoms peeling with cold energies and burning dark anger. They snapped at each other like rabid beasts.

  She sensed another presence, and cursed to herself – a second Raza, a warlock, was somewhere close by, just out of sight and trying to flank Danica while her spirit was distracted. Clawed hands snatched at her, and her face burned with pressure. Something like terrible flames pressed against her body.

  Men started screaming in pain, their skin split by dark fire before they burned cold from the inside out. Danica’s spirit came racing back just in time to deflect the energies away from her, leaving the bridge vulnerable to the first Raza’s onslaught of crystal smoke, a signature Danica recognized, for the fumes would make it so only those chosen to see would have any vision, while to everyone else the moist vapors would be entirely opaque. It was the same Raza witch she’d battled when she thought Cross had died.

  Vehicles rumbled across the bridge, rattling loose stones beneath their heavy wheels. Deafening blasts erupted out of the smoke and crashed into buildings, sending down rains of rock and dust. The Bloodhollow defenders returned fire, but it was hard to target anything in the wall of fog.

  Danica snared the assaulting spirit as it burned through men. Pain lanced back at her, but the safeguards in her arcane appendage shielded her flesh from the backlash. She sensed the male Raza at the other end and heard him cackle with cruelty as he sent a charred blast of force her way up the smoky tendrils of their spirits.

  In that moment between thought and action, she struck. Her spirit had been hardened and tempered by imprisonment in the arcane foci of her gauntlet arm, and he was able to best the other mage’s spirit and follow the Raza’s cohort back to the warlock’s physical bod
y. Her spirit burned straight through the Raza’s lowered safeguards and smashed into the shell of his flesh. His mind shattered like ice and his bones cracked. Danica collapsed, her chest gripped with sharp pain, her breaths raw and cold in her throat.

  “Dani!” Maur shouted. He fired into the fog with his Mac-10, and a dead Coalition soldier stumbled out and fell to ground. Maur kept firing and brought down another, then held the grenade launcher aloft and launched a shot into the smoke. “Maur says we need to fall back!”

  “Maur needs to fall back,” she said through gritted teeth. “Danica is going to hold the God-damned line.”

  She pushed herself up. Gunshots glanced off her spirit’s blood red shell. The false sky turned pitch black, the fog thick. Another blast rang out, and even over the groan of engines she heard the growl of Troj as they sharpened their wicked swords against the stone railings. More men fell behind her, cut down by gunfire.

  Danica advanced onto the bridge, stepping out so close to the fog she felt sure she’d come face-to-face with one of the advancing trucks. Maur screamed at her to fall back and take cover, but she’d let her spirit soil her with his rage. His power built in the golem arm, refined with miniscule but vital arcane engines and thaumaturgic chargers which doubled, redoubled his intensity, swirling the core of his ethereal form like a boiler churning water. The wall of smoke advanced in a wave of hissing fumes.

  A Troj leapt out of the darkness, its ugly red face peeled back in rage and an enormous sword lifted over its head. Maur hit him mid-leap with a shot from the grenade launcher, sending him off the side in a blast of meat and shrapnel. Danica sensed more of Lucan’s men at her back, holding their ground and firing around her into the smoke, and more kept coming to the front even as their unseen enemies mowed them down. The air was full with explosions and blood.

  Danica breathed deep, called her spirit up to the edge of her bloodsteel fingers, and ran forward. The smoke bent just enough for her to see the bladed edge of a vehicle and the shadow of the Raza witch floating through the air. Danica skid to a halt and brought her fist down on the bridge, snapping into the stone with an ear-shattering crack.

  A pulse of energy swept out in a steady crimson wave, blood-black vapors which curled across the ground and left a tide of crystal in their wake. Danica leapt back, supported by her spirit as she floated just far enough to get out of range of her small detonation. The stone on the bridge turned brittle, and a sickening series of bursts sounded like a glacier falling apart. Hairline fractures appeared on the dark face of the stone. Smoke burst up from the seams, geysers of dust and ash.

  She heard cries of panic, grunts of alarm, shouts for everyone to fall back. Danica came down, her spirit unable to keep her aloft any longer, and she stumbled, dizzy from the magic, and went down to one knee. A glance back showed her that she was a dozen paces from the end of the bridge, where the sandbags waited. Her body ached with fatigue, but she knew she could make it.

  The bridge started to collapse. Chunks of stone slid away. The black cloud of smoke began to thin, allowing glimpses of the three trucks, one of which became stuck as a shard of concrete dropped away beneath it; the wheels spun wildly, widening the gap and causing the cracks around it to grow even faster. A few men plummeted to their doom, screaming as they vanished into the dark waters below.

  Her legs shook unsteadily as she turned. The stone at her feet snapped, and a foot-wide section fell. She felt her center of gravity shift as a jolt of dizzying fear shot up her spine. Her balance was awkward and the shooting started again as Coalition men gathered themselves and scrambled forward.

  “Target the bridge!” she shouted. Maur loaded his grenade launcher. A bullet grazed her shoulder, and two more struck the ground at her feet. Danica turned and fired with her SIG Sauer as she pulled her spirit around her. They were both exhausted, but they had to move.

  A hard force like a gale wind slammed into her, knocking the breath from her lungs and sending her to the ground. Stone cracked against her shoulder, and a jolt of pain twisted through her ribs. She felt the bridge shift beneath her, sensed the emptiness on the other side. It was difficult not to let fear overwhelm her.

  Behind her one of the vehicles was slowly falling down through the bridge like a beast sinking into an icy lake. Cracks rippled across the stone. The air filled with the noise of breaking.

  A shadow fell over Danica, and the smell of hex filled her nostrils as the Raza witch descended from above. Fans of silver flame licked from the woman’s fingertips, scouring the ground beneath Danica as she rolled away and nearly fell through the gapped stone.

  Another Troj came at her from out of the smoke, sword held high. Danica ripped Claw and Scar free from their sheaths and ducked into the attack, and black steel sank through red flesh with the sizzle of metal in cold water. The Troj gasped as it fell, collapsing through the rock.

  The bridge continued to come apart. Danica dodged bursts of black fire as they came sailing out of the Raza’s eyes. Hollow space opened beneath her feet, but she found purchase on the crumbling stone. She saw a sea of water and mist in the gorge below.

  More Coalition men broke through the smoke, their weapons blazing even as their fellows fell to their deaths.

  Danica was still a dozen paces from safety, but the stones were rapidly coming apart. She smelled cold thaumaturgic energies as the Raza’s spirit did his best to hold the bridge together, which would give the Coalition men enough time to cross and reach Bloodhollow.

  Her spirit flowed through her. Danica sucked air between her teeth that tasted fiery and thick.

  The battle raged on. Maur stood at the head of the bridge like the gatekeeper to hell, his Mac-10 blazing and a long-knife at his belt. The M203 pelted off rounds into gargoyle fliers as they tried to carry Coalition soldiers over the chasm. Bodies splattered and fell in gory liquid streams, sometimes screaming, sometimes too devastated to make any sound.

  Danica shot her spirit out in a fan of fire and blood. She couldn’t count her enemies, couldn’t differentiate between large and small or near and far. Gunfire ripped down those her magic somehow missed, though she sensed the Raza deflected attacks even as she worked to hold the bridge together. One of the trucks had nearly sunk through, held by impossible magic that kept it leveraged between the cracking stones. The other two vehicles moved around it, wheels grinding up rock in a shower of sparks, guns rotating and blasting the sandbags to pieces. A cloud of blood red smoke rose behind her. Danica couldn’t see if Maur made it or not.

  The Raza flew at her, dark hood thrown back, eyes blazing white with hate. At Danica’s command her own spirit came back and gelled around her like a plasma cloak.

  The Raza’s spirit assaulted her. Danica breathed, found a calm inside. She couldn’t miss. As the dark spirit spread wide in a bed of black fire she snaked Claw and Scar into its folds, severing the umbilical tip where ghost met flesh, where spirit joined with master. Danica pushed through with all her might, sliced through the phantom’s core and sent it screaming into hell. The Raza screamed, too, as her soul was torn asunder and her mind split by the loss of her soiled ghost. The silver-cloaked witch collapsed and the bridge, no longer stabilized by her power, flew apart in a blast of rubble and dust. Smoke launched up from the edges in ashen waves as exploding rocks and mortar flew through the air like a meteor shower. Men screamed, metal groaned.

  The thundering sound echoed through Danica’s ears as she was pulled back, by her spirit, by another’s hands, she couldn’t know. Gunfire rang into the sky. Bodies fell, plummeting in a mass of silhouettes and debris.

  She lay at the edge, legs dangling out over the side of the abyss. The crash of motorized armor sounded on the rocks below, followed by a triad of dull explosions which shook the cavern. Bloodhollow’s defenders watched and allowed themselves a moment of cheer.

  “Maur thinks Danica is a badass,” the Gol said. Danica looked up at him. She wished with all her might she’d laid her hand on his shoulder then...for sh
e never got the chance to do so again.

  A whirling set of chained knives flew down from above, a bola launched from some warrior gargoyle. The blades were keen, black as night and soiled with grime.

  There was a moment after the weapon struck that Maur seemed fine, that it was as if the weapon hadn’t found him at all, when she could have rose to her knees and took hold of him, but she didn’t move, couldn’t, just sat there stupidly watching, wondering if he was injured or not. That moment, she knew even then, would haunt her for the rest of her life, that moment and its passing, and when it was done Maur gurgled dark blood through his face-wrap and fell forward, off the edge and into the gulf below, vanishing in the misty smoke at the bottom of the gorge.

  Danica blasted through the sky, indiscriminate. Gargoyles loomed dark overhead, and there was no way she could know if she struck the one who killed Maur or not, but in her heart she hoped she did, and she hoped it didn’t die right away. Her pistol ran dry so she switched to an M4A1 she found on the ground and fired hexed rounds into the fliers, watched them fall, and emptied the magazine before she switched to her spirit, who blazed with her hate as he scoured the sky with flames. Winged bodies writhed and bled and fell, crashed onto Bloodhollow’s floor or into the edged sides of the gorge or continued down, vanishing in the smoke, where they’d land atop their slain comrades.

  When she was young, Danica couldn’t imagine the nightmare of watching a loved one die, for there had been no one to care for, no one whose loss she could believe would bring her to tears. Now it had become a constant in her life, and her chest ached like a sliver of ice had been jabbed through her heart.

  “This way!” someone shouted. More blasts sounded from deeper in the city. Explosions rang up above from the strange tunnels that wormed their way into the massive ceiling.