They weren’t done. The battle was just beginning.
Danica steeled herself. She stared down where Maur had fallen, wiped the tears from her face, and turned back to the city.
PART FIVE
BREACH
They let the girl live.
Reaver wasn’t sure if they would, even after he explained to the vampire Commandant how she was a potential asset.
Soul energies pump like liquid through his body. His arms and legs are whole again, reconnected to dark steel and powered with portable battery packs, and new blades are set into the housings on his forearms. He’s given a new bone rifle and face-mask, and within minutes his brain swirls with numbing drugs and cold unguents which return him to a state of calm he hasn’t known in days.
For a time Reaver floats adrift in a void ocean. He feels nothing, hears nothing save the vampire dirges and chants. He drifts through fog, swims in red waters under the black skies.
He sees her. He shouldn’t – the memories have been wiped clean, purged from what’s left of his mind when the new drugs are administered and he’s reconnected to the vampire collective consciousness, but she’s there. The blonde woman, the one from his past, not Muse, two different people, separate but the same, bleeding into one. He can’t tell which one is real.
There is no real. I’ve been dead for years. Whatever used to be me is gone.
And yet there she is.
Reaver is called to the deck of the lead warship. The cabin pulses with motion. High Jlantrian text scrolls across a dozen black screens around the tightly constrained room. The turbines groan as the vessel slowly lifts off and pushes through grisly red clouds that look and smell like meat. Vampire commandos stand at attention, rifles slung and mouths wide to reveal their razor fangs. The sky is black and bruised and wreathed with unnatural lightning.
It is a new ship, Drake explains. He’s an aristocrat, not a solider, a fact that is clear from the way he carries himself. His eyes are too large and his fangs are enormous. Dark runes paint his excessively pale flesh.
“It’s impressive,” Reaver speaks through his grilled face-plate, for it is rude for a subordinate to answer to a superior through the collective. That would have been the case even if he wasn’t a mere revenant. “Three times the size of a Dagger class warship.”
You have an excellent eye for detail, Drake tells him.
The ships fly through the clouds. Reaver knows there are ground troops as well as a dozen Razorwings higher up in the sky, staying out of sight. This force will rendezvous with a Coffin before converging on Bloodhollow.
The dark metal inside the cabin clicks and whirs as carefully crafted controls slide into place. Pumps and tubes push hydraulic fluid through the bridge, and targeting read-outs signal in the air before the gunners.
Drake circles in front of Reaver. The vampire is a full head shorter than the revenant. He wears a resplendent cape of purple and crimson and has long hair as dark as midnight.
That attention to detail, he tells Reaver, doesn’t explain how you lost your team.
Reaver has no answer. He’s already explained the run-in with Fanian forces, and of how being disconnected from the Ebon Kingdom’s collective had adversely affected Razor Squad, leaving them discombobulated and ineffective against even an inferior force. But that is not what the Commandant wants to address.
“The human,” he says through pouting lips, surprising Reaver by addressing him out loud. “You say she may prove useful.”
“She is a member of the East Claw Coalition,” Reaver answers. “I believe they, too, are looking for Bloodhollow.”
Drake considers him. A lean and much taller vampire steps up and looks at Drake, and the way the two stare with their utterly black eyes without Reaver knowing what’s happening tells him they’re communicating on a hidden channel, a layer of the collective allowed only for officers.
Reaver thinks of the girl...Muse. She’s slowly fading from his memory.
Good. The sooner forgotten, the better. He only vaguely recalls what she’s done to him, the echoes of memory she’s somehow resurfaced just by her resemblance to some dead human from his past. He thinks of her, and an image of the blonde girl as she lay dying flashes through his mind, jolting him with sorrow. He panics.
Reaver, Drake thinks to him. What is it?
“I need to be brianwiped again, sir,” Reaver says.
His master considers him, and nods his ascent.
Dying in his arms. So pale, paler than she’d ever been. Friends stand nearby, though not long ago he’d wanted to kill them for putting her in danger.
“You’re all I’ve ever wanted,” he whispers, so quiet she can barely hear him. She’s cold in his arms, too cold, and he feels heat drain from her body faster than the blood gushing from her stomach.
She’s gone.
His heart cracks. Everything he wants, everything that’s ever made his miserable life worth living, is slipping away, and for a moment he feels the blade slung over his back and wants to join her. He isn’t sure why he doesn’t use it.
The warship lands at the edge of a deep crevice, a massive cave mouth twisted like the yawning face of a sleeping giant. The ridge is made of cold grey and white stone blended together in swirls of alternating color, a frozen storm of rock.
Reaver is on the ground. His metal joints creak and his undead flesh pulses as necrotic fluids flush through his system. The bone rifle is heavy in his grip, and the new blades in his arm housings are so razor sharp he can practically taste them.
Fifty vampire shock troops – Shadowclaws, most of them, clad in black and armed with twisted blades and razor garrotes, clawed hammers and short-range rifles loaded with incendiary rounds capable of ripping armor to shreds – stand along the ridge, while a hundred more wait in the Coffin that hovers at the edge of the cliff face. Razorwings and their crews circle the sky, waiting for the order to descend.
Reaver looks for the girl, Muse, whose name he remembers in spite of his memory being wiped again, but she’s nowhere in sight. Some part of him hesitates at her absence.
Information streams through his mind with the force of a raging wildfire, tactical readouts of the caves below. The complex is vast, a natural hewn tunnel network which leads to the ruins of Bloodhollow.
PROCEED the vampire missive says. ELIMINATE ANY RESISTANCE.
They move through the tunnels in Creed formation, four vampires and one commander. Reaver is one of the leaders. His Creed stays close, weapons held ready and fangs bared, dark armor and pale flesh half-lit by crimson shadows. He smells their lust and hunger, tastes blood on the lips of those who’ve recently fed. Thick dripping stalactites and pools of brackish ooze press underfoot. The tunnels curve and twist, and the invaders have to climb and jump down wide vertical shafts covered with cobwebs and dust.
Stone faces have been carved in the walls of the twisted passages, yawning voids which lead off to deeper tunnels. The corridors wind snake-like, an ant-farm made massive. Lunatic angles plummet down jagged slopes and molten spirals of quartz melt into the crumbling granite. Wisps of smoke swirl against the surface of the rock, and the echo of motion reverberates from far below.
Every Creed takes a different set of tunnels to avoid walking into an ambush. Passages lead deeper into nothingness. He sees strange carvings of razored angels and sinuous serpents offering sexual pleasure, massive spiders destroying cities, blasted frescoes of humans being drowned in a black sea.
They come upon remains, mostly human, but not all. Bloodwolves, Firehorns, vampires – scores of vampire jawbones, fangs and skulls have been carefully petrified in some sort of cryotic gel and fixed to the walls like trophies. Whoever defends this place has killed to keep it a secret for a very long time.
He wonders about Muse, but then tells himself he has to forget about her. He carries on.
Deeper down they cross ice-reamed limestone so desperately cold it shocks even his undead system to step on it. The shadows shift unnaturally,
and passing through them is like wading into a turgid ebony swamp. Every surface is unnaturally still, like the place stands apart from time. Hairline cracks run from the edge of the crooked tunnel to the floor of the massive chamber. Darkly frosted dragons stare down on them, crumbling statues pierced with veins of ice and collapsing under their own decaying weight. Thick mist swirls like a solid wall.
In the collective consciousness he senses more vampires nearby, other Creeds converging on the attack zone.
Whatever power is in control of Bloodhollow masks the presence of both itself and its forces. It will be impossible to know what they face until they’re right on top of it, but that’s why each Creed sets detonation charges to clear space for the Razorwings and warships.
Is she okay? Will they Turn her, or kill her because he wasn’t there? A memory comes at him unbidden, the blonde woman again, his love, dying in his arms.
The Creeds come to an enormous cavern meticulously carved from the mountain. He sees smoothed surfaces lined with hoarfrost, spiraled pillars of petrified limestone. The ceiling is hundreds of feet high, the cavern at least a mile across. Crude towers line the far edges of the cave between the various tunnel entrances. Rows of iron beams protrude from the ground like the teeth of a lower canine jawbone, and balls of green gaslight float up above. Small portals in the floor lead deeper.
Reaver looks around, sees vampires ahead and behind, and wonders what he’s doing there.
The fighting starts unbidden: an explosion, a series of shots. Vampires snarl as they fire bone rifles and blade cannons into the surrounding darkness. A sniper takes out three vampires in quick succession before someone spots the building he’s hiding in and destroys it with a hex grenade. Smoke and blood pour through the outer edges of the battle zone, and the rapport of gunfire and explosive blasts echoes through the frozen atmosphere.
Reaver stays low. There’s little cover aside from the buildings and the mist, and the human attackers are dug in. He hears concern in the collective consciousness, questions as to how the White Children or the Coalition could have possibly reached Bloodhollow before the vampires, but there will be time to ponder that later.
Bullets tear through stone. Fires burn deeper in the fog. Reaver moves fast through walls of smoke and makes his way to a series of small stone pillboxes reinforced with ice-sheeted black iron. He fires through the embrasures and spatters skulls with explosive rounds. Bullets glance away and chunks of rock chip off the walls. He fires, turns, fires, reloads, fires, all in careful rhythm, cut off from his Creed but unconcerned, moving effortlessly the way he’s been taught, even if he can’t remember who or what it was who’d taught him.
Explosive blasts shake the walls and chunks of rock fall to the floor of the unnatural cavern. Dark shapes take form in the shadows above as Razorwings and their crews push through the rain of stone shards and explosive vapors. A great rumbling signals the approach of the Coffin.
Reaver takes a bullet in the arm. He feels no pain, but the shot forces him to drop his rifle. Blades spring free from forearm housings and without even thinking he leaps forward and cuts through a man’s jugular, not noticing until the human is dead that he isn’t even a solider, just some wastelands brigand with ill-fitting equipment and an old rifle. The figures in the smoke are outcasts, disorganized but with the element of surprise on their side.
He slices through two more men who come at him with submachine guns. Magic plays in the air, a twist of roaring spirits. Flames and ice hail down in carefully controlled staccato blasts. Vampires are skewered on frozen lances or set aflame. Razorwings rip through the roofs of the towers while Shadowclaws cast dark grenades into the newly formed gaps. Reaver breaks off a blade-mount but replaces it with one of his short swords. He turns and faces a man coming at him full force
and suddenly he is back in the arena, watching her there at the edge of the battle, barely alive, held between worlds to force him to fight
and Reaver barely ducks in time to avoid the axe blade. He lets his attacker fly past him and cuts through the back of the man’s head. The battle cries of the Bloodhollow defenders ring loud through the cavern, but Reaver barely hears them. He falls hard against the wall of one of the adobe domes, his head spinning.
He knows who he is. Or at least who he used to be.
I can’t let her die. Not again.
But the moment passes. He feels Drake’s will force him onwards, and with renewed vigor Reaver slices through humans and drives towards Bloodhollow’s core with a force of vampires at his back.
TWENTY-TWO
BLIND
Blood trails down the icy banks like dark rivers and burns through the grey crust of snow, releasing pockets of rancid steam.
She stands in a forest. The sky is pale and deep, dappled with clouds that look like smears, and the air is bitingly cold. All she wears is a loose, pale dress. Her hair is slicked back against her scalp and her skin is icy blue, darker than it used to be. Frosted runes and tribal tattoos line her naked forearms, and her wrists are bound in ringlets of bones. Her feet sink in the ice and slush, and she shivers uncontrollably.
Things lumber through the dead forest. Low ebon fog seems to burn the ground. The trees go on forever, a labyrinth of frozen cedars and petrified pines.
She hears the ice crack beneath her. Her breaths cloud the air as she cautiously steps forward, desperate not to disturb the eerie stillness that has such a stranglehold on the nightmare region.
A nightmare, Shiv realizes. I’m not awake. The thought does little to comfort her.
Something like a sun passes overhead, but it’s far too distant and pale, a frozen teardrop in the slate of sky. The things draw closer, and she realizes they’re creatures, humanoids, but not human. Dark cloaks and icy blades, frozen eyes and black crusted skin that flecks off like bits of soot. They are soundless, and they are legion. She moves to avoid them, but she sees them in every direction, derelict dead things set to block her path.
Fear ices up her spine. The sky lenses in like a shard of burned glass. Desperate, she calls for the spirits, hoping they’ll be there, but she’s alone. She runs.
Hands reach up from out of the earth, clawing the dress and nearly tripping her. She tears away, her heart pounding. Something snarls on her clothes, a rotten branch that tries to grasp her, but she pushes away from the dead forest and into the barren plains.
She finds herself at the edge of a frozen sea. She doesn’t recall getting there. The forest is gone and she’s here at this broken coast, where jags of bone and razor coral protrude from the glassy surface. Dead things are trapped there, bats and birds and children, beating against the pane of the lake with wings and hands turned bloody and raw. The liquid beneath the sheet is turgid and thick with muck and grease. Shiv backs away, fear clutching her stomach.
Why am I here?
She looks up from the dead things pounding against the ice and sees the ghosts, an armada of derelict spirits, green and molten, dripping their way across the sea like they’re melting wax. A few have distinctive features, but most of them don’t – they can only appear as they remember themselves, and most have lost their minds after having been exiled from the living world for so long. Their faces are incomplete, sometimes missing, and their forms are shifting and unstable, riddled with mongrel limbs or connected to things they remember from life, books or mementos or trinkets grafted to their bodies. The stench that wafts away from their ranks is mortifying, a rolling tide of rot and decay. Their voices call into the wind, call for her, for the one who vowed to protect them but failed.
I’m sorry! she screams, but they can’t hear her, because she has no voice in this place. Everything special about her has been stripped away.
Again she turns, and runs.
She comes across a massive tree stripped of its bark but laden with black leaves. Shiv doesn’t know what to make of it, and it takes her long moments to realize she’s again shifted to some other nightmare. She recalls the Maloj, remembers seei
ng it under the ice, remembers Mace having her tortured so her spirits would reveal Bloodhollow’s secrets.
I shouldn’t be here.
It was her fault. She never should have driven Ronan away. He’d seen how desperate she’d become, what lengths she was willing to go to in order to end her pain. The voices had become too much, and they were driving her mad. In desperation she’d turned to him for help, hoping, begging him to do what she couldn’t.
The spirits protected her no matter what, even from herself. He could do it.
But he wouldn’t. Ronan, who she felt certain would understand her pain, told her it wasn’t her decision to make, that the White Mother had chosen her for a reason, that Cross and Danica and everyone else had died to ensure she’d fulfill some purpose.
That was when he’d decided to leave. She had the White Children. They would fight their war against the vampires without him. If she was going to have someone help her take her own life, it wouldn’t be him.
What a fool I’ve been.
Shiv watches the tree. It reminds her of something Cross told her, something that held meaning to him, a place where he and his sister had gone before she’d died. Shiv wonders if it’s the same tree, if that city she suddenly sees in the distance is Thornn.
“You were easier to break than I’d hoped,” a voice says.
Shiv turns, reaching for a weapon and calling on wastelands spirits that aren’t there. The hairless woman before her is alabaster pale, the same hue as the icy fields and lifeless sky. The ears are sharp, at least as edged as her pure black fangs. There’s little human about her save her shape. Her eyes are large and black, her skin leathery, textured. Her armor is as white as her flesh, and thin traces of oil-dark blood trail from the corners of her mouth.
“Who are you?” Shiv asks, trying to sound brave but failing.
“The destroyer of your world,” the woman says. “I wanted to introduce myself, meet you in the flesh. Few have had that pleasure…you should feel blessed.”
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 30
