Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (13 page)

Ronan and the rest of the team should have been there, but they’d been half a world away when the vampires gained the upper-hand, struggling for their lives against a bunch of ghosts and trying to hunt down a shadow wolf sorcerer who’d nearly killed every last one of them. 

He still wasn’t sure exactly sure how it was the Ebon Cities had finally routed the Southern Claw.  No one did.  Before anyone knew what was happening Thornn had fallen, and within a week Seraph followed.  Ath was the last holdout, having become the new temporary headquarters for the Southern Claw as soon as Fane’s assault had begun, but even that city could put up only so much resistance against the onslaught of the vampire armies when resources had already been spread thin dealing with Wulf’s incursion from the east. 

Dumb fuck didn’t care that his greedy bullshit was destroying the human race
.  They never did.  Ronan had killed the worst sorts of men, and one thing they always had in common was that they never saw themselves in the wrong, never considered their actions evil even as they trod the innocent beneath their feet.

That’s the difference between me and them.  I know what a bastard I am.  I know I’ll pay for all of the things I’ve done. 

I’m paying for them now.

He came upon the camp near dusk.  Ronan had marched all through the day, protecting his skin from the ashen desert clime and his eyes from the low winter sun.  He’d walked through forests of petrified cacti and shallow riverbeds filled with lime.  He saw shacks and abandoned grain silos in the distance, just metal ghosts in the freezing wind.  His boots felt frozen to his feet and his cowl was crusted against his scarred face.  Ronan’s cloak fluttered in the icy wind like the wings of a midnight bird. 

The hills rolled, sometimes gently, sometimes steep.  Cracked stones like snapped-off teeth stood at the old borders of villages or territories, and he crossed the remnants of concertina barricades and spilled sandbags from ruined outposts. 

The refugees he sought had found a watchtower still largely intact, a steel and stone column atop a crested hill.  Scrub and stones provided cover for his approach; he navigated through a labyrinth of low ravines filled with dust and scuttling crab spiders. 

Ronan found position where he could lay prone, concealed by a low thicket of brambles and frozen thorns.  He watched, and used the scope of his H&K G3SG/1 to scout the area, ready to shut the sight guard if he saw anyone looking in his direction so he could prevent any sun or snow glare from reflecting off the lens and giving away his position.  His muscles were stiff and his eyes gummy, but Ronan had been through worse.  He was in his early forties, but he was still capable of things most men half his age couldn’t dream of doing, even if it was getting more and more difficult for him to shift his mind and body to the cold realm called the Deadlands, that dark place where he was capable of pushing himself to the point where he didn’t feel pain, where he didn’t feel anything. 

Going there wasn’t the problem, and never really had been.  It was coming back.

He spied a sentry walking a perimeter around the tower, and after a moment he saw a woman, a spotter, carefully hidden up top.  Ronan snapped his lens shut and waited until she shifted back out of sight before he flipped the scope open again. 

Ronan worked to gather his information before the sun set, when he knew the self-proclaimed Black Ice Marauders would emerge from their lair and begin the night’s hunt.  The tower had only one entrance, a solid iron door doubtlessly bolted shut from the inside, and the entire gang would hold up in there until it was time for them to emerge; the scattered tents and sandbags around the tower’s base held some of their mundane equipment and concealed the bladed snowmobiles they used to raid borderlands settlements. 

You freaks are worse than the vampires
, Ronan thought, and he smiled.  It was going to be a pleasure collecting the bounty on Rage and his crew, especially since they’d elevated from snatch-and-grab equipment and munitions raids to kidnappings and rapes. 

Ronan clenched his fists, kept the blood flowing.  It would be time to move soon.

The sun set like blood.  Darkness and shadows crept across the pale white landscape.  Ronan clenched his teeth against the cold and held himself perfectly still in his prone position, the rifle held tight as he peered through the scope.  The wind grew colder, and a bone moon rose.  Frost and ice blew across the ground. 

Ronan breathed deep.  He didn’t want to enter the Deadlands, not until he had to.  He could deal with the cold, could deal with the cramps and discomfort.  As a child he’d been tortured, exiled to the desert and left to fend for himself with nothing but the clothes on his back, sent to kill other children and rape young girls, ordered to hunt down deadly predators and not return to the Crimson Triangle’s monasteries empty handed. 

He’d been raised to be a monster, and yet had somehow found the core of the man inside.  It was difficult to still sense it these days, but he knew it was there, the human heart beneath the bitter shell, the soul in the machine.  Danica Black had helped him find it, just as he’d helped her find her own battered soul after it seemed the Ebon Cities had wiped everything she was away. 

Sometimes he wished things had turned out different between them, that he’d have found some way to make something happen that he knew never could. 

He shook himself.  No need to dwell on that now.  She was dead, and he was here, and that was all there was to it.  He had a job to do.

Just as the sunlight faded and the white world turned dark the Black Ice Marauders emerged from their soiled fortress.  They started to throw tarps off their snowmobiles and ready their machetes and assault rifles for the night’s hunt.  They were a motley bunch, dressed like beasts of the winter wilds – their pale armor and coats were lined with fur and held together by straps of leather and steel, and their hockey masks were painted with blood and coal.  After a few minutes all dozen-and-a-half of the group was out in the open, a small host of raiders. 

They went about their preparations with calculated efficiency – Rage and his group had been doing this long enough to know how to move through the motions quickly, minimizing their exposure to the cold and taking only those articles of equipment they absolutely needed to take down whatever borderlands outpost or caravan they’d set their sights on.  Rage always had a specific target in mind: the wastes were too vast and dangerous and the pickings too slim for them to wander without a clear destination. 

Ronan saw Rage, a thin and wiry man with a pair of one-handed throwing axes he wore strapped across his back.  He gesticulated dramatically, doubtlessly informing the others of how much blood they’d spill and girls they’d steal and how unstoppable they were and...

Blah, blah, blah, blah.  I can’t even hear you and I’m already wishing you’d shut up. 

Ronan kept watching, and finally the wolf came into view.  Rage’s white Bloodwolf was legendary in the wastes, as much a part of the man’s reputation and mystique as his brutal tactics and his ability to hide from what few authorities there were left.  The brutish creature was at least six feet tall at the shoulder, its greasy white-and-grey fur mottled with plates of chitin and bone.  Its breath steamed into the night, visible in the light of torches they’d lit at the perimeter of their camp, and its dark eyes were like cold moons.  It bared its teeth and Ronan saw the glow of its razor smile through the sniper scope.

Now all he had to do was wait.  It wouldn’t be long now.

The temperature continued to drop.  The Black Ice Marauder’s torches burned low, but within a half-hour they fired up their snowmobiles and were on the move. 

Ronan waited, perched behind frozen scrub oak, and watched with his lips going numb and his eyebrows lined with ice.  His back was stiff and his elbows were raw from his lying on the ground for so long; the grip of the rifle seemed to have grown into the inset of his hand. 

The Marauders went in pairs, zooming off in slightly different directions across the barren plains.  The air was full with the sound of buzzing engines. 

Ronan waited till they were gone, then moved down the slope and into the shadow of their concrete tower.  He’d been motionless for hours, but his sense of physical discipline allowed him to move even with muscles stiff and his body sore.  He slid fast down the hill, dodging sharp stones and cracks in the ground.  It would have made sense for Rage to have posted a sentry, but Ronan had kept careful count of every Black Ice Marauder who’d emerged from the stronghold, and if there was anyone still on watch it was someone he hadn’t seen yet. 

He came to the tents, heard the cloth rippling in the black and icy wind.  Ronan drew his katana and approached slowly, his boots crunching ice and stone.  The shadows in the tents were thick, and Ronan smelled vehicle fuel and salt as he passed barrels of preserved food and boxes of Molotov cocktails.  Sleeping bags and rolls of blanket lie stuffed behind sandbags, and boxes of what appeared to be wheat and rice had been stacked up to be used like tables. 

Ronan listened to the shrill whistle of the wind as he advanced on the tower, flexing the blade in his grip as he put a palm on the door.  There was no handle, only a keyhole, so Ronan jammed his kodachi blade inside and twisted.  Even without stepping into the Deadlands his sense of hearing was keen, and he’d been raised to pick out sounds no normal ears could detect, so he knelt down and placed his ear to the metal and listened to the grind of the tumblers.  There was no way he could pick a lock with a dagger, but Ronan was able to turn the mechanism enough that a well-timed and perfectly placed blow to the door with the palm of his hand was enough to jar it loose enough that he could then rise in a swift motion and kick it down. 

Darkness waited inside, and the gloom was thick and smelled of rust.  Ronan advanced with his blade tip forward, one hand held out to guide him.  The interior of the tower was almost pitch, and beneath the groan of the wind he heard water running down the walls and clanging metal in the distance, a resounding chime like someone repeatedly and rhythmically striking two pipes together. 

The blackness pressed in on him like breath.  Ronan moved slow, using his free hand to navigate the rusted rivets and jagged steel plates on the walls.  The air became stale the deeper he went.  Shadow vapors burned his eyes, and the walls seemed to be closing in. 

He heard something,
felt
something.  Breathing, and not his own.  There was something there with him in the dark.

Shit.

Ronan was falling.  His lungs swelled with cold and his teeth clenched.  He felt the void of the distance, the rancid and frigid touch of lost souls.  The darkness shifted, polarized so he stared through a milky mirror.  Everything but his body slowed.  Muscles tensed, fingers tightened. 

He stepped into the Deadlands.

Creatures with horns shifted and clawed at the edge of the darkness.  Pale fangs and dripping eyes, coiled appendages wrapped around the ethereal borders of the inner tower.  Spectral watchdogs, ghostly hounds left to search out intruders.  He’d heard rumors that Rage was a warlock, a man who’d carefully learned to conceal the manipulations of his spirit so he’d go unseen by Ebon Kingdoms detection measures.  Now Ronan understood how: Rage left his spirit there in the tower when he went into the wastelands, and they remained separated by distance but connected by tangential chains of aether, his soul extended and left remote. 

He’d detected Ronan’s intrusion, and soon he’d return.  Ronan didn’t have much time.

Rage’s spirit roiled in at him like a wave of grisly water.  Ronan dodged slithering tentacles, sensed as they snarled against his body even if he couldn’t feel the actual pain.  He dodged past the tangle of clawed limbs, a forest of boiling ghost flesh.  Clouds of white dust parted before him as he sailed into a striking position, his katana held high.  Ronan barreled towards the phantom beast’s heart.  Ghost blood splashed over his eyes and teeth.

Ronan kept pressing the attack.  He felt Rage’s pain, sensed as the wiry man’s heart seized and stopped from over twenty miles out as his arcane spirit was torn to pieces.  Ronan took grim delight in hacking that ghost apart. 

He kept moving.  He saw smears and stains on the walls, the places where the Marauder’s victim’s had been spattered as they were brutally tortured to death.  Rage and his crew had been responsible for a number of vicious kidnappings, and very rarely had their victims been returned in anything resembling a decent condition.  He tasted that fear and death, smelled the tears and agony.  Flashes of writhing women and men appeared like polarized images in the darkness, ghostly silhouettes in the murk. 

His blade grew hot in his hands.  He needed to slice into something, needed to kill, and there was nothing there living. 

Nothing there living.

Ronan desperately scoured the black innards of the citadel.  Workbenches, sleeping cots, munitions and maps.  Reserves of rations and dried meats, more rooms filled with blood and dank fluids.  Nothing and no one alive.

Nothing alive.

Some part of his mind was still attached to the flow of normal time, to the place where everyday people lived.  Ronan in the Deadlands wanted to find things to hunt, to destroy; his senses were stretched taut like skin over old bones, and the flow of blood in his mouth made his gums ache.  He snarled at nothing, and the sound echoed all around him.