Something in the air grabbed her attention. Danica looked up and saw Lucan and Shiv floating over the battle, their arms folded together. Light dripped from them like cold grease. Danica felt something tense, like the air has frozen solid, in the moment before they struck.
Lucan opened his mouth and howled, a grim and heart-stopping noise that deadened the atmosphere like they’d been dropped underwater. Sound distorted, images rippled away. Everything was made distant.
Shiv moved closer, seemingly unaffected by the sluggish atmosphere. The Koth undead raised their weapons, but before they could fire Shiv brought down a cavalcade of destruction. Spirits erupted from her hands, twisted like sabers. They burst Scarecrow’s faces and crushed their bodies into twisted sacks of bone and meat. She moved into their ranks like a whirlwind of invisible blades, slicing through corpses with her bare hands. Dank light surrounded her, a corrosive field that splayed vampires and burned them to black husks before their cartwheeling corpses even hit the ground.
Every motion she made was perfect, a careful dance. She twisted, sliced through a wight’s skull, motioned with a hand and sprayed bodies apart. The vampires tried to converge on her but their motions were slow, made sluggish by the rippling effect Lucan conjured, an air turned sodden and thick. Ghosts screamed through the air and came to Shiv’s aid, spirits of the wastelands, a horde of lost souls from this time and other times, the tortured remains of those millions slaughtered by The Black. Her body became a halo of itself, an echo of ghost-burn images that circled and surrounded her, an angel of flames and edges. Vampires decapitated, a Scarecrow sliced in two. She leapt up and came down, and as her feet touched earth a wave of fire spread away from her body like an explosion, blasting through undead and tearing them apart with licks of razored flame.
Danica and Cross fought on. They hacked through the undead driven back by Shiv’s gruesome display and cut them down from behind. Bullets brought down those few that escaped the Kindred’s wrath.
They met the other Bloodhollow fighters at the middle, closed the line between the enemy as the New Koth forces were slaughtered from both ends. The ground was a steaming field of blackened bone and burning flesh, dismantled armor and grinning skulls. Clouds of ash and blood hung in the air.
Everything was still, but only for a moment. A cry of alarm went up. She heard a heavy shot, like something out of a cannon.
The vampires were there, the force Cross had told her about before. Danica saw their leader, a tall revenant with stringy blonde hair sticking out from behind a solid iron mask, with dark eyes and a grill plate where the mouth should have been. His blue and white armor was covered with serrated edges, and he held a short sword and a smoking hand-cannon.
Lucan was down. It took her a moment to realize it, but the revenant leader had shot Keth, and now the mage lay on the ground, surrounded by his people as he coughed and sputtered blood. The wound in his chest was enormous, a gaping and bloody hole.
“I am Reaver,” the revenant spoke, his voice tinny and distorted and yet familiar somehow, a hollow echo of something she’d heard before. “And now you die.”
Shiv turned, and Danica and Cross and Ronan stepped up behind her. The Bloodhollow forces had pulled Lucan back and stood between the Ebon Kingdom’s assault team and the temple, but they were broken and weary, their ranks thinned. Warfield and Felix emerged and looked bloodied, as they’d dealt with the undead who’d broken through, and now they stood at the edge of the courtyard with magic and guns ready.
Behind Reaver stood dozens of armored vampires with swords and scimitars and bone rifles, war-wights with sharpened claws, Magewraiths, a kaithoren. A slavering host of undead assailants, dark armor and rotting flesh, sharpened teeth and dripping slime. Their gruesome ranks outnumbered those of the defenders by at least twice.
If Lucan dies, all of this was for nothing.
“No,” Shiv said quietly, and yet her words carried force, like they’d been bellowed by some enormous creature of the deeps.
Danica felt a rumbling. There was a crack, like static, and a hum in the air. Shiv’s body shimmered with ice blue light. She seemed displaced, separate from everything else, and the corona of unfire darkened to cobalt, the echo of wings grew edged. She was unstuck in time.
Shiv moved with such insane speed Danica didn’t even see the motion until the girl was already deep in the vampire’s ranks. The torrent of spirits moved with her, a spiraling wave.
Power exploded away from her body. Danica and Cross and Ronan and the rest of the Bloodhollow defenders charged ahead in her wake. Air rushed into Danica’s lungs, adrenaline pumped through her veins. Blood had caked against her face. Her spirit filled her with strength and the blades filled her with bloodlust. Cross and Ronan howled as they all crashed into the enemy line.
Explosive noise, metal crashed against metal, torn flesh and crushed bones. Blood sprayed, guns fired. The air was a catastrophe of noise.
Danica battled through the mass. Her golem arm crushed skulls and vampire breastplates as she cleaved through pale flesh with her blade. Cross and Ronan were at her side, forcing their way through opponents in a haze of swords and blood.
Shiv was at the head of it all, ghostly and merciless. Flames ripped through the Ebon Kingdoms undead. She motioned and spirits responded, and they chopped through foes in spiraling and deadly whips of light, left and right, up and down, the stabs savage and fast. She cut through leering dead faces and smashed bodies to pieces in an orgy of violence.
The wounds piled up. Bloodhollow men were carved and lacerated, undead were taken down and smashed until they could no longer move. A man took a blade in his face, another was bitten and had his throat ripped out by a vampire commando. Ronan skewered a war-wight and cut it in two. Cross fired a shotgun and blew off a vampire’s face.
Shiv mowed through the ranks, as did Reaver, moving with impossible speed and power, a juggernaut of vengeance. Forearm blades sliced into flesh. Blood and screams weltered up around him as he hammered through the Bloodhollow warriors.
Both sides were nearly broken. The vampires fell by the dozen, but it wasn’t enough.
Danica and her spirit lashed out in a desperate whirlwind. She was surrounded, so she blasted her enemies with a burst of red fire. She moved with a fury she’d never known. Thoughts of failure spurned her, people she’d lost, Cole, Kane, Maur. Memory of them filled her with rage.
The courtyard was a mist of blood blown by a bladed wind. Men and undead lie torn on the floor, limbs and body parts skittered everywhere. Danica was covered in red and black. She saw Cross, his bloody face twisted in a feral snarl.
Shiv faced the Magewraiths, and with a swift stroke of her phantom weapon opened them up and sent their rotting insides to the ground; even before they fell she cleaved through the kaithoren, spattered its undulating mass into a thousand drops, and then a flamewraith, which she bound in a shroud and misdirected its attack so a line of napalm tore through the rear vampire ranks and melted them in place.
Reaver came at Danica savagely. She was barely able to deflect his first strike when his second sliced into her ribcage with a flash of impossible pain. Her spirit launched down the revenant’s throat and burned him from the inside out. Cross attacked Reaver savagely and put Soulrazor/Avenger through his back. Ronan stepped in with his katana and sliced across the undead warrior’s armored face, ripping the mask away.
Danica screamed when she saw what lie beneath. When Ronan and Cross could see what she did they backed away and let Reaver’s body crash to the ground.
She fell, her vision dizzy. Her spirit desperately worked to seal the wound, to pack the torn flesh back into place. Strength drained from her body, but she felt the injury healing, felt the cracked bones roughly snap back where they belonged.
The battle was done. There was more fighting off in the distance, bomb blasts as Coalition forces and Ebon Kingdoms regulars fought on in the streets, but the courtyard was secure.
The sudden, col
d solidity of the air was jarring. There weren’t many survivors, maybe a dozen Bloodhollow men in addition to herself, Cross, Ronan, Warfield and Felix. All of them were covered with blood – they were like gory ghosts standing stunned on a field of carnage. Torn and ruined bodies, spattered organs, torn limbs, smoking undead husks, shredded armor, broken blades, smoldering flames, all of it stinking of death and stained with blood. Danica breathed deeply, dripping with other’s remains.
She fell into Cross’s arms, and he held her close. Exhaustion swept through her like a wave of water. She’d never been so tired.
She stared down at Reaver’s body. Kane’s body.
He was barely recognizable. His once thick hair was thinned and peeled away from his rotting scalp, and the skin had tightened and sank down to his bones, clinging like leather. The body had been augmented, metal and bone reinforced with arcane metals, and the armor he wore appeared fused to his dead flesh, making him taller than before, more imposing.
But it was unquestionably him. The shape of his jaw, his eyes, still as blue in death as when he’d been alive. That voice, distant and tinny though it had been, was one she’d known.
Now he lie still, armor torn open by the blades of his former companions. His friends.
“My God...” Cross says. “Dani...”
Danica’s tears came in violent bursts. She could no longer hold them in. Everything, the fighting, the war, all she’d lost came crashing in on her, and it was all she could do to hold on to Cross as she nearly stumbled and fell.
“We’re okay,” he whispered. “We’re okay.”
She held him close, wanting to believe him.
Motion at the edge of the courtyard caught her eye.
Shiv held Lucan in her arms. He was breathing, but only barely. His chest heaved, and with each motion more blood leaked from his wounds; every breath he drew was a death rattle, rasping and heavy and gurgling. The glowing girl tried to heal him, but for some reason it wasn’t working.
“We have....to hurry...” he rasped. “Before...I’m no longer here...”
“Everything is ready,” Warfield said. “Felix has the calculations made. If we’re going to do it, we need to do it now.”
Danica looked down at Kane’s body.
I’m sorry, she thought. She looked at Cross and Ronan, and they watched her in kind. They all understood what needed to be done, so without hesitation they followed Shiv and Lucan into the temple.
The loss of their friends would not be in vain.
TWENTY-FIVE
HEROES
The inside of the temple was planed smooth, red walls covered with a thin crystal coating of dust and frost. The ceiling seemed higher than before, and it took Cross a moment to realize that was because it was higher – the dome extended further than should have been physically possible, a swirling vortex of shadow, one side of a massive hole. Strangely, it didn’t look deep at all but flat, like staring at a static screen of darkness.
The Breach. Once below their feet, now over their heads, the plane of portal shifting as reality started to unravel. It was weakening.
He, Danica and Ronan came in with Shiv. Her cloak was tattered at the knees and elbows and her frosted skin appeared matted with mineral oil and ice. The palms of her hands were dark with blood, not dripping and fresh but old and crusted like it had been there for ages.
They were all exhausted, covered with wounds, stumbling in the near dark.
We’re almost there. Almost there.
Cross had lost all sense of time’s passage. He no longer knew if it was day or night, or if that even mattered. His eyes burned with fatigue, and every muscle ached. Fresh cuts on his face and arms burned in the cold and oozed puss.
The vision of the vortex seemed tattooed on the stone. Cross watched as Warfield and Felix went to a thaumaturgic sensor they’d set up on the floor, gauges and wires connected to nodes hooked to the walls. He’d seen such devices before, and knew that they were normally used to determine the potential arcane stability in order to gauge if it was safe to use magic in an area. Lucan had implied they could use that same equipment to determine the exact point they should target in the Breach in order to seal it forever.
It was strange seeing Warfield there. He’d lusted after her for years, but he’d decided even before leaving Thornn that she wasn’t for him. She was still lovely, slightly older and hair cut pixie-short, and the runic tattoos on her neck and arms were plainly visible now that she’d removed her cloak and worked in a tank-top and dark cargo pants. He hadn’t thought about her in a long time, and even now all he needed was to glance at Danica – bloody, dirty, also down to her armor jacket, her red hair long and flowing down her back, her golem arm moving with metallic menace – to forget the other witch altogether.
Still, her being here has helped. It’s a good thing she had that equipment with her.
Felix nervously prattled on about how they needed to be careful, how they could do serious damage, but Warfield calmly told him to chill out and carry on.
Lucan was dying. Danica and Shiv knelt close to him, doing their best to staunch the flow of his strange dark blood while Ronan stood guard near the door. Cross looked on, his throat tight with fear.
“The ammo they hit him with was specially prepared,” Shiv said. The spirits swirled around her, a visible cloak of roving shadows and angry vapors, ethereal things given shape and form. “Reaver was given rounds attenuated to the Soulweaver’s life patterns. If it would have hit me, the effect would be the same.”
Cross put his hand on Danica’s shoulder, and she squeezed it.
“How close are we?” he called to Warfield.
“Close,” she answered curtly. “Felix is working on it. Just hang on.”
He stared up, and that old fear returned, stronger than before. The darkness overhead glittered with false stars and dark constellations, cold light the color of pure ice. Shadows roved there, vague outlines of charred bones and eyes from the pits of hell: staring down, watching, waiting. Cross looked away, feeling weightless and sick. Ice ran through his veins.
“Easy,” Danica said, and she stood up and held him. “Easy.”
His heart ached at her strength. They gripped hands, and Cross realized he could no longer imagine his life without her in it. He would protect her, always.
Cross imagined a future where he and Danica lived on a croft in some distant corner of the world. Shiv was there, and she and Danica loved each other like sisters, and together they’d all teach each other how to survive and live and love, they’d plant and hunt and keep camels for riding across the wastes of the healing world. And Ronan would be there, Shiv’s protector, their loyal friend.
We can be more.
Cross breathed hard, and felt tears in his eyes. Bit by bit he tore the dream from his mind. It was a childish fantasy, and he was a fool to imagine it. All that mattered now was the Breach, and sealing it forever.
A scream rang out, male and high-pitched.
It’s a good thing she had that equipment with her.
They flinched as the cry ripped through the freezing air. The noise fell from above like rain.
How did she know to bring that equipment?
Soulrazor/Avenger was cold in his grip as he pulled it from it’s sheath. He didn’t remember reaching for it, wasn’t even sure what was happening.
Cross’s skin crawled. He heard claws against stone, smelled the stench of burning things. Every instinct inside him told him this was wrong, that he wasn’t supposed to be there. He glanced up, and found himself looking into the heart of oblivion.
The portal above widened. Shadows bled through the rip, so cold they fell like oil. There were no words within Cross to understand this black eternity which stretched out overhead, the thinness of the layer, the sheer mass of what pushed from the other side.
The floor of the room steamed like the surface of a frozen lake, and the air above split like a dark and smoky jewel. Slabs of jagged midnight fractured from
the other side of the barrier like the shifting of some great weight. Everything shuddered.
From the corner of his eye he saw Shiv stand and stare while Lucan struggled to stay alive. Danica and Ronan both had blades drawn and held ready.
It’s a good thing she had that equipment with her.
Across the room, Felix was dying. Something had cut his throat, and his blood fell in slowed time as he choked and tumbled to the floor.
The Breach was growing. Shapes shifted and undulated like something melting beneath the sun. Black fire burned cold. He saw wolfen aspects, dark with hunger, their souls as black as night.
How did she know to bring that equipment?
He heard another voice then, a voice from his nightmares.
You are here by my design. And I will take you.
Fear iced through his heart. Cross felt sluggish, moving as if trapped in a dream. Slowly he turned and looked at Warfield in the half-lit darkness. She smiled and nodded. Fire erupted from her hands. The light blazed her shadow against the wall, unstable and dark, flickering in and out like a memory. He looked into her cold, cold eyes and saw the same white as from the snowy field, the white from the tavern in Dirge, the malign presence of the Whisperlands, the creature that had guided his path for years, maybe his whole life.
Warfield was the spider: Azradayne.
She’d brought them together, all of the pieces she needed, the blades and the last of the Soulweavers, assembled them where she could use the power they held to do what she couldn’t do herself, to finish opening the Breach. Centuries of hate curled in her pale gaze. In a glimpse she showed him her cursed birth, a creature born of chaotic energies, a child of the destruction wrought upon the worlds by The Black. Not truly an ally of the Maloj, she saw them as a tool to be used for her own ends: the destruction of all living things. Her revenge for being born, the unmaking of reality.
Shiv moved between them and bent the flames away. It visibly pained her to reflect Azradayne’s attack, but the Kindred gritted her teeth and stepped forward, her eyes shining with cobalt light. He could see her changing. Midnight energies rippled across her skin and turned it bluer, almost silver. Her jaw was hard set and her chin raised, but her lips were red with blood.
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 33
