“Fuck you,” Shiv spits, and the woman laughs.
“You have spirit,” she says, “but you’re not very original. And to think of how much promise you once had.”
The woman turns and looks out over the plains. Something is happening.
Shiv feels dwarfed by the shifting landscape. Great ruptures and cracks form in the ice as jagged glaciers push like mountains in the distance. Cracks explode like lightning bolts across the face of the world, breaking open rich dark rifts which scissor-cut their way from horizon to horizon. Gouts of steam erupt into the ice-white sky, and before Shiv’s eyes they solidify into monuments of frozen smoke, gelid towers twisted like frozen serpents. The sun darkens, begins to drop, and the air shifts from storm to calm.
“One thing changes a hundred others,” the woman hisses, her voice heavy and full of rasp, like she gurgles blood. “Chain reactions. Set one thing in motion to affect another. And another. And another.” She turns back to Shiv and smiles. Black blood dribbles down her chin, a stark contrast to her paleness. “Affecting weylines, probabilities. Gazing through futures possible and pasts mutable, rotating events, stealing people from one place and inserting them into another, affecting a change I’ll control.”
“You’re insane...” Shiv says, but the woman smiles and turns back to watch the exploding landscape. Great breaks in the ice sound with dull booms so fierce Shiv feels the shockwaves even from miles away. The air thickens into a sort of liquid and turns black, oil in water.
“I was born of such a rift,” the woman says. “Others shifting lines, affecting probabilities by manipulating events. They sought to escape the Maloj, sought to end their wars, but they didn’t anticipate what would come about. Dimensional folds, temporal ruptures. Realities pasted on top of each other, shifted, shaken, shattered and left on the floor. New worlds born, sometimes cleanly, often not.” Her voice thickens. It’s hard for Shiv to tell, but the creature sounds like it’s suddenly in some sort of emotional distress, like it’s recalling a painful memory. “Creatures are born in those ruptures,” she says. “Rampant life force gives rise to spontaneous creations. No parents, not really. Just a cursed thing, wrapped in the primordial fluid of discarded worlds, an embryo sack formed by thousands of lives lost all at once, a soup of the dead, collapsing energies combusting to give rise to new life.” She turns to face Shiv and she’s entirely different, transformed in the blink of an eye, one moment that pale woman and a spider the next, monstrous and grotesque, moon-pale legs and solid black crystal eyes, razor limbs scraping the ground, growing larger by the second, a monstrous arachnid bulk which looms like a darker sunset.
Shiv screams, and backs away.
“Life like me,” the spider says. Its voice is quiet and calm. The air is suddenly rancid with cold, and the sky darkens. Everything shifts, turns sepia. Shiv feels small, like she’s about to be smothered. “I shape lives, other’s lives, the lives most likely to matter. Lives like Eric Cross. Confluent energies generated by alterations in the probability fold, the temporal dissonance. New things rise.”
Shiv shakes her head, tries to drown out the voice. Something shifts behind her, and she sees with horror that the black leaves on the tree are really crinkling flesh made dark with blood. They unfold and grow until they’re the size of manta rays, which hover in the air between her and the dead city.
“You are here by my design,” the spider says. “And you will do my bidding.”
The dripping shards of floating skin fold out around Shiv’s body. She screams.
She woke alone on a field of snow.
Her skin was frosted and scaled with scars, and her fingers and toes ached like they’d been dipped in acid. She could barely sit up. Icy wind blasted across her face and ripped open scabs. Shiv cried, and her tears froze almost instantly.
She looked around. There was no one, and nothing, not for miles. She’d been abandoned, left alone with her fate. At first she thought she was still dreaming, or dreaming again, but the world was real – she felt the snow crust between her naked toes as she stood up, felt pain jolt up and down her legs as she stumbled along through the arctic wind.
They’d left her to die. The voices were silent. She was alone, just like in the dream. Just she and the wastes.
Her fingers and toes were turning black. Shiv stumbled forward, her clothes too thin to offer any protection. There was nowhere to go.
I’ve failed, she thought. She thought of all of the people she’d let down, of the spirits who’d trusted her, who’d looked to her for salvation in a world they could no longer understand.
Shiv walked across the frozen fields. She didn’t know how far she made it before she fell to her knees, ice sticking to her hair and body. Her limbs were so frozen she could barely feel them. Her hands shook, and pain lanced across her skin.
I can’t, she thought. I won’t.
You will, a voice said. It was a voice she knew.
Why? I’ve failed. I have nothing now, I am nothing.
That’s not true, the voice said. Keep faith, child. I chose you for a reason.
Shiv started to cry. She didn’t see the giant’s approach until he was almost there with her, didn’t see the people with him. Shiv collapsed in on herself even as she was scooped up and felt heat pour back into her body.
They took her to shelter and wrapped her in blankets. The frostbite and weakness and toxins were purged from her system by powerful magic, magic that seemed somehow familiar.
She just wanted it to be over. She was tired of all the pain. Shiv wanted to go home, but there was no home, and never would be again.
Darkness. She couldn’t see, and couldn’t feel. It had been long since she’d known such peace.
She felt presences in the blackness around her, that void of her soul. They were silent, but familiar. People she’d loved, people she missed. For all the hundreds of spirits she’d encountered there were precious few whose loss had actually affected her. Her father. Cross. Danica. Creasy.
Ronan. Her black prince, her dark knight. The pain of losing him cut deepest, because she’d driven him away.
She floated in a liquid reality she couldn’t comprehend, and didn’t want to. Something enveloped her. Her body drifted in darkness, insulated. Something hissed softly. She felt no pain, and for the first time in a long time she knew no fear.
Awake.
Shiv inhaled deeply and opened her eyes. All was dark and still. She was in a shallow pool fed by dripping obsidian columns. The room was warm and dark, a stone chamber with no windows. Her body shook as she tried to stand. She was naked, but clothes were there, simple pants, a loose shirt, a cloak. The air smelled of musk and age, cool against her body.
It was difficult to rise. Her legs were like wet sticks, barely capable of supporting her weight. Mist purled under her chin.
“Where am I?” she asked the darkness, not really expecting an answer, and while none came she realized she already knew. Understanding dawned on her, elusive before but for some reason now as plain as day.
She was there to seal the Breach. She’d always known the power flowing through her veins had been granted for a purpose.
She’d been chosen.
Shiv emerged from the room and stepped into a wide corridor of red rock and sloped shelves. It took her eyes a moment to adjust as she moved down the hall, for the air was thick with smoke and dust. Sounds slowly filtered in, gunfire, rumbling, the hiss of undead. Bodies lay outside the door, men who looked like they’d been watching over the entrance to her chambers, but they’d been gutted and left to bleed out.
A war was taking place all around her. She didn’t have much time.
Fear hung over her like a shroud, yet Shiv found her thoughts oddly disconnected and calm. Her father had raised her to be the best person she could, and Creasy had died so she could do what needed to be done. She was the last Kindred, the sole inheritor of the White Mother’s power. She was the force to be feared, not the Ebon Kingdoms, not the Maloj,
not the Coalition or New Koth or the spider. She, Shiv, was something to be terrified of. She was the key, even if something had kept her from realizing that until now.
She pressed down the corridor and emerged into a war-torn city. She saw towers of red crystal and spires of crimson rock under siege from seemingly every direction. Explosions of dust and smoke riddled the false sky. High above was a cavern ceiling pocked with cave mouths. Vampires and undead streamed through those openings, crawling like insects along the jagged stone face.
Shiv found herself at the end of a long lane of blank stone buildings. Bodies lay on the ground, torn apart by bullets, blades and claws. A few undead husks lay there, as well, smoking in the cold and smelling of funeral pyres and rot. A dark hole had been rent in a nearby wall, forced from the other side.
Spirits surrounded her. She’d never felt so many, from distant places she’d never even heard of, other times, other realities. She sensed ghosts of worlds destroyed, worlds to be, of people who hadn’t even been killed yet: future souls, suffering the loss of hosts whose lives might not even come to an end. The touch of metal slithered against her skin and shadows lapped around her fingers and toes.
Greyness merged with darkness. She felt her mind everywhere, her presence and consciousness stretched like a constellation of stars. The air burned blue. Everything was different, more complete: the edges different, the margins, the shadows and cracks in the walls. She saw.
Shiv noted the presence of her friends, friends dead, but not dead. She sensed the gulf beneath them, the impossible rip that yearned to be opened, but that for the sake of everyone needed to be sealed.
Heart swimming with power and eyes cast blue with ancient magic, Shiv went to meet her fate. It was time to close the Breach.
TWENTY-THREE
ALIVE
Ronan felt hollow inside. He’d regretted it every day since he’d left her there outside that Bonespire. Why had he left?
Maybe I was afraid, he told himself. Afraid of what she was doing to me. But that wasn’t it. After Cross and Danica had died it had been just been the two of them, alone in the world. He’d cared for her, protected her with a passion he’d never before known. The sense of duty and responsibility he’d only ever felt for his teammates had been transferred to this strange, awkward girl, blue of skin and dark of eyes, so transformed from the child he’d met back at Rimefang Loch she was no longer the same person.
We’re both changed, you and I. This is what the world does to you. It twists you, molds you into what you need to be.
He remembered that first night, when they’d realized they were alone, hiding under an old oak at the edge of a rock bluff near The Reach. In the years to follow they’d make contact with others, would learn of the White Children and their desire to follow the power Shiv held inside her. But for those first few weeks it was just them.
Ronan had never cared for another as he’d cared for her. He’d been raised and bred to kill, to take life – it made no sense to worry about its value, to form bonds. They were strictly forbidden from using names there in the barracks, he and the other boys, because they weren’t human – they were killers trapped in young men’s bodies, beaten and bled and forced to run miles barefoot on hot desert sand and dumped into Bloodcat breeding ground with nothing more than a hip-knife.
He remembered back to the steps which led to where he was supposed to kill the blonde boy, recalled a swell of fear when he’d realized what he was, and how badly he wanted to be more.
Sometimes in his mind he imagined them together, he and Shiv, with no White Children and no war. Sometimes they ventured across the wastes, living off the land and avoiding danger. Sometimes they had a cabin or a bunker, and she’d learn to use her powers while he taught her how to survive, just like those first few weeks. Something about Shiv had kept him alive, even after all of those years of being apart.
He’d wanted so badly to take her somewhere, anywhere, but there was nowhere she’d be safe. He couldn’t save her, not even from herself, and when she’d insinuated that she’d wanted to die and that only he could help her, he knew he had to leave.
“It’s not your choice,” he’d said. She’d never forgiven him, and he’d never forgiven himself.
The greatest regret of his soiled life was that he’d never been able to tell Shiv how he felt, to show her how much she meant to him. He’d held more love for her than he ever had for anybody, even more than for Danica, or the team. But all of that love had meant nothing because he couldn’t help her when she’d needed him the most.
Now, at last, he could make things right.
Red fog surrounded them, a haze of boiling blood. Ronan’s vision kept fading in and out.
“This is impossible,” Warfield said. “You were dead.”
She was fawning over Cross again, just like she always had, and just like she always would, even with the end of the world looming over their heads.
It all made perfect sense to Ronan. He’d traveled these strange roads before, back when the team had pursued Cross across the wastelands and found themselves in a devastated future Thornn that had been destroyed, and then at a Shadowmere Keep where Cross had been taken back in time and held hostage for years. Maybe that sort of thing should have bothered him, but it didn’t. Not anymore.
We don’t have much time left, too little to worry about things that don’t matter.
“Where’s Shiv?” he asked.
“There,” Cross said. “She woke up.”
“And why the fuck wasn’t someone watching her?” Ronan growled. He couldn’t think too hard on how it was that Cross and Danica could be there in Bloodhollow and not dead.
Battle raged all around them. Ronan, Cross, Warfield, the hex technician Felix and the blonde man they called Lucan Keth raced across Bloodhollow. A barrage of gunfire sounded near the distant bridges, and even from halfway across the city Ronan smelled the stain of colliding spirits and explosive magic. His head was pounding. Armed men and women who looked like they’d just crawled out of the wastes raced up and down the streets, pausing only long enough to shoot at roving Coalition gargoyles or Ebon Kingdom’s undead descending from above, winged zombies and revenants and vampires throwing themselves from the distant ceiling, a cavalcade of bodies, some of which survived their falls by breaking roofs or crushing people beneath them.
Ronan and Cross hewed through undead as they rounded a corner.
“Someone was watching her,” Lucan said. “They were killed.”
“One of you should have been with her...” Ronan said.
A kaithoren appeared from out of nowhere, bloated and oozing puss and blood. Razored tentacles lashed out and snapped into a nearby building, sending chunks of rock hailing down. A blast of putrid air washed over them, the soiled stench of the creature’s presence. Ronan stepped into the arc of a tentacle as it snapped down and nearly took his head off, then swiped up with his katana and sawed away three limbs at once. Writhing appendages fell to the ground amidst jets of squirting green fluid. The creature’s beaked maw hissed at him, but Warfield sent a wave of bladed ice through its flank, crippling the creature’s bulbous body long enough for Cross to sink his double-blade into its core and bring the monster down in a sickening splash.
Ronan felt dizzy. He glanced down and saw that the creature hadn’t been so slow after all, as a sizable gash was in his side, oozing brackish blood.
“A little help here.”
Warfield’s spirit wrapped around him, scalding his skin as it sealed the wound. He closed his eyes, trying to keep the Deadlands at bay. He felt it pulling him in.
Not yet. It had been so hard to return the last few times he’d entered. He had to make his next trip count, because there was no guarantee he’d be coming back. Shadows crept into his thoughts and hardened his insides like blood freezing in his veins.
“Where is she?” he said. “Where’s Shiv?”
“And Danica?” Cross asked. “Is she still at the bridge?”
“Yes,” Lucan said. “And she’s in trouble.”
“Shit,” Warfield said. “We can’t be everywhere at once.”
“I’m going after Shiv,” Ronan said. “You all can do what you want.” He looked at Lucan. “Where is she?”
“This only works if everyone makes it,” Lucan said. “Shiv, myself and the blades all have to be present in the temple over the Breach, alive and intact.” He looked at Warfield and Felix. “That equipment you have can help make sure we’re pinpointing the correct spot and get the job done properly.”
Felix looked at the pack he was toting – radio gear, a spectrometer, some barometric gauges, an arcane flux analyzer and a good old-fashioned eye-ball in a glass sphere – and then at Lucan.
“It will?” he asked.
“Yes,” Lucan said. “So you two get to the temple and make yourselves useful. Start analyzing weylines and look for the strongest flux point.” He looked at Cross. “Get Danica, bring her back here. I’ll help Ronan.”
Gargoyles and vampires and winged undead fliers bore down on them from out of the sky. Ronan and Lucan stepped through the lees of bomb-shaken structures, crippled red domes and crimson towers falling apart at the seams. They coughed in the dust of decades-old bricks.
Gunfire raged around them. Explosive bursts pocketed above, staccato blasts which rippled across the subterranean sky like stains in water. Ronan smelled death in the wind, and he sensed thaumaturgic pressure ooze from every pore of the man next to him. It was a familiar power, the power of the blades, only less diluted, raw. A burning presence.
They slashed through shadows and raced around the remains of broken buildings. Lucan led, moving with determination, his cold eyes glowing like iced diamonds. Neither of them spoke – there was no need. They might have had different reasons for needing to get to Shiv, but they shared that purpose, and they would both kill or die to see it done.
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 31
