Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (16 page)

Use it
, she told herself. 
You’re stronger than this.

“
Anything yet, chief?” Alvarez asked over the comm.  He was a lean man, with a perpetual five-o-clock shadow and thick blonde hair.  He, Delgado and Raine had all worked together before coming under Meldoar’s wing, a trio of mercenaries who’d shifted their loyalties between various criminal cartels, including some work for Danica’s old “friend” Klos Vago.  She wasn’t sad to hear the crime lord had met his untimely demise at the hands of some less-than-enthusiastic henchmen when he’d refused to open his doors to Fane, and while the city wasn’t exactly in good hands at least it was out of his. 

“
Nothing,” she said.  “You kids may not get to go to Grandma’s house after all.”

“
Are we there yet?” Raine said with a laugh.  Delgado, true to his half-Doj heritage, just moved his massive shoulders in the semblance of a shrug. 

“
Maur says you should check the port side,” the Gol’s voice rang over the comm.  “There’s something interesting there.”

Danica broke out her binoculars and moved across the tight metal interior of the warship, a space dominated with weapon controls, bolted seats and machinery parts. 

She looked out the port-side hatch.  Brine and seaweed washed up on a beach addled with rock-spiders and predatory coral.  The air was damp with salt and musk, and Danica had to pull back her hair and tie it up in a bun to keep the wet strands from slapping across her face.  Maur was a capable pilot but the cross-winds were heavy, and Danica and the others had to hold tight to keep from being thrown from the craft.

Maur steadied the warship, and after a moment Danica’s eyes focused on what he’d warned them about.  A nightmare of spines and tentacles roiled out on the briny surface of the water.  Explosions of bone and sweeping blood-soaked limbs lanced up from the churning waters, claws and pincers layered with oil and musk.  Its black skin was clear even in those dark waters, slick and ridged with razor joints and iron spikes, pulsing toothed maws and deep white eyes holding everything around it in a predatory gaze.  The aquatic horror must have been a hundred feet across, a deranged armored whale. 

“Looks like it’s bound for the shore,” Alvarez said over her shoulder. 

“
And that means Meldoar,” Raine said, sounding irritated, which seemed to be the dark-haired woman’s normal tone of voice.  The city was a few miles inland, just a vague outline in the haze and fog.  There was no way to know if this crab-whale had land movement capabilities, but Danica figured it was probably best if they didn’t find out.

“
Swing us around, Maur,” Danica said, and she signaled Delgado to man the chain guns.  The gunnery seat swung into motion, a wide armored chair at the back of the ship that pitched the gunner into a nearly upside-down position.  Maur had based the modifications he’d made to the ship on vampire tech, rigging the weapons systems so they took the shooter into a sort of virtual three-dimensional interface which allowed them to close the gap between themselves and their targets and ignore their real-world surroundings. 

The ship buckled into high gear.  Danica breathed deep, and the cold plasma of her spirit filled her blood like lead.  Vapors swelled in her chest, and his ethereal touch lanced across her skin like she’d jumped in ice water. 

Alvarez and Raine readied their AR15s and held themselves ready by the door while Danica prepared her MP5 and the swords.

The waves parted in a storm of sand and water as Maur lowered the draconic airship closer to the surface.  Danica heard the click and whir of guns over the roar of the modified turbine engines.  The ship tilted, and she saw small hordes of crab and armor-plated fish scurry across the sand.

“Maur says 'Good luck',” Maur said through the comm.  Danica never understood why he referred to himself in the third person, and doubted she ever would.  Some things were just best left as mysteries. 

“
Thanks,” Danica said.  “Hopefully we won’t need it.”

She, Alvarez and Raine dropped down the few feet to the beach, landing on the mixture of soft stones and buried rock.  For as cold as the air was up in the ship it was colder on the ground, and in moments her skin was soaked through with mist and sea spray.  Danica stowed the MP5 behind her back and stayed low as they moved further down a long and winding sand belt which ran like a crumbling bridge out to deeper waters. 

The sea beast was ahead, a dark splotch under the rising blood sun, growing larger by the moment, if no more distinct.  Like the creatures they’d battled in Nezzek’duul it was a shadowy mass, ill-defined but clearly enormous, a clawed  assembly of armor and flailing limbs.

Hard wind pushed in at them form the north.  Danica’s spirit wound around her, coiled and ready to spring.  Claw and Scar both pulsed and ebbed against her skin, their necrotic heartbeats timed to her own.  She’d bonded with the blades and grown adept at blocking out their phantasmal voices. 

Danica took point, while Alvarez and Raine hung back and spread out to a ten meter spread.  The sound of the waves grew louder, a dull roar which surrounded them as they jogged up the narrow bank. 

Incendiaries rolled out across the water, a dull staccato beat of cannon fire as Delgado started the guns.  Peeling booms, echoing blasts.  Waves exploded beneath a barrage of hot shells.  The roar of the warship echoed and doubled back as Maur swung around and came into position over the water.  Smoke followed the vessel like a tail. 

Heavy rounds tore into the aquatic horror.  Tentacles splashed and smacked into the waves.  Danica, Alvarez and Raine kept moving.  They saw the mass a hundred yards out, just beyond the end of the pale sand bar.  The black shape slithered and ebbed just below the surface, an island of fangs and teeth. 

Danica was about to motion the others to set up the mortar when the sand bar rippled.  Enormous spiked arachnid limbs shot out of the water and launched high in the air, throwing seawater and masses of kelp and jellyfish into the purple sky before slamming back down.  Spines dug into the sand.  The waves were suddenly bloody and thick.

“Go!” Danica shouted. Her spirit oozed away from her hands in a molten wave of gold and white, churning flames filled with static and smoke.  Licks of energy wrapped around the two nearest appendages, bent upwards like jagged girders of dark steel.  A deep groan issued from the depths of the Loch. 

More shots hammered down, and Alvarez and Raine pelted the limbs with their assault rifles.  The air rang with gunfire and noise. Squelching sounds like suction came from the beast. 

Danica ripped two grenades loose and threw them into the water; Alvarez and Raine followed suit, and just as they tossed them the warship swung around and pumped rounds from the chain guns into the black mass.  White noise and cold explosions.  Danica sent her spirit into the water as a lance of black ice.

The monstrous limbs stuttered in place and groaned like metal beams before they slowly collapsed.  Danica pulled her spirit back and formed a soiled cold shield to protect the team from two of the enormous insect’s legs as they came crashing down.

“Maur says you have incoming!”  The Gol’s voice rang through her ears in the comm-mike.

“
What?” Danica turned. 

Shapes emerged from the sea, sinuous and serpentine, fast-moving and much smaller than the black beast.  The creatures bore undulating fan wings and long sweeping tails like those of predatory eels.  They were about a hundred yards out, not so much floating in the water as moving over it, curled snake-like beings with humanoid torsos.  Dark eyes as cold as death glittered in the dawn light, and their thick heads were filled with rows of dagger-sized blades locked in carnivore grins.  Their arms were ridged with spines and hooks and their skin was sickly grey-green, dripping with putrescence and ooze.  Bones and flaps of human flesh covered their thin torsos like tattered clothes, and their hands were triads of large claws hooked together like bird’s talons.  There were three of the creatures, their deep-throated growls mockeries of human laughter.

“Christ, that black thing was a vehicle…” Danica said. 

These Dracaj were the pilots.

They motioned with their gangly claws and suddenly their bodies were surrounded in coronas of cold blue light.  Danica smelled glazed corrosion, fecal stench and acid smoke.  They pointed at the human mercenaries with their twisted fingers and bent the air into funnels of dank green light.  Static built, electrical energies curling into the atmosphere. 

“
Get down!” Alvarez shouted, and he raised his rifle and fired.  Bullets evaporated off the shields of cyclonic light.  Danica tasted hex, the tidal wash of some bestial and primitive magic.  Raine was about to fire but she hesitated when she saw that Alvarez’s weapon was having no effect.

“
Move!” Danica shouted. 

Exhausted though her spirit was his power built against her skin.  Gears and pistons slid into place in her bloodsteel arm.  Thaumaturgic elements moved into position, portals set with focal lenses and arcane conduits which allowed her spirit to intensify like water building pressure in a pipe.  Her skin went cold, her eyes white.  The Dracaj’s bastard magic churned and tightened the air, making it difficult to breathe. 

Danica focused.  Gelid wind scraped against her.  Her spirit coiled inside her golem limb, that monstrosity that had been forced upon her.  Anger welled in her heart. 

The trio of green humanoids glided through the air, their tail fins flapping and undulating like they were still underwater.  Black and cold eyes glared at her as they unleashed their gathered energies, caustic wads of dripping power that sizzled and cooked the beach.  Trails of green smoke made everything rancid and sick.  Danica breathed, held, waited until the moment when they chose to sever themselves from the magic and release it, that split-second of vulnerability when they released the ties between the energies they’d crafted and their own bodies, like an umbilici waiting to be cut. 

When that instant came she launched her spirit.  He lanced forward and buried himself in the cleft between the Dracaj and their power, that miniscule gap in moments that occurred after they released their magic but before they shielded themselves again.  The gap widened with red fire, an incendiary blaze of napalm and nails.  Razor darkness shelled inside their protective barriers like a grenade thrown into a tightly sealed room.

The Dracaj’s attack fizzled, cut off at the source.  Drips of green light fell into the sick waters as the reptilian masters screamed.  Danica’s spirit growled in her mind, his rage and ecstasy overwhelming.  Ethereal flames licked against monstrous hides, boiling their skin and throwing them into paroxysms of agony.  Their mockeries of laughs turned to mockeries of screams.

The warship hovered low, drowning out all sound, and the roar of the chain guns hammered the air.  Slugs the size of baseballs ripped at the reptiles.  When the last vestige of their arcane shields fell away the Dracaj had no defense against the guns except for their speed.  Two of the creatures were too slow, and their brittle and scaly flesh flew apart and sprayed out on the foamy waves, but one of them moved so fast it became a blur. 

Alvarez and Ruiz fired their weapons, trying to get close enough that the Dracaj couldn’t elude them, but the monster sailed through the air like a murderous rainbow, shifting directions and speed and moving around the humans like they were stuck in jelly. 

Danica breathed deep.  Her spirit was still depleted from the battle, so she drew the dark blades Claw and Scar and surged forward.  The cold whispers of the necrotic swords filled her mind, grim voices promising agony and pain.  Her eyes shone with grisly light as she lifted up, propelled by the magic in the artifact blades so she moved nearly as fast as the Dracaj, even faster.  Its blank reptile eyes shone like horrid black moons, and gnarled fangs peeled back in rage as she brought the weapons home.  The sickly grey-green head flew away in a spray of muck and slime.  Danica had to roll under the body and press herself to the sand to avoid the thrashing tail and wildly grasping claws.  Steam and smoke sizzled from the corpse.

The waves crashed against the shore, and water filled with brine and blood  soaked through her boots.

“Well done,” Maur said in the comm-link.  “Maur thanks you.”

“
No problem,” Danica said.  “We’ll consider it a test run.”

Alvarez and Ruiz exchanged glances and watched her nervously for a moment, then nodded.  None of them had spoken about the mission they’d been given, but it weighed heavy on all of their minds.  The number of hostiles encroaching Meldoar’s waters had increased dramatically over the past few weeks, but nothing they’d had to deal with would come close to the importance of finding Bloodhollow. 

Danica had only learned of the rumors recently, something they’d never caught word of in her own timeline: a lost city, buried somewhere deep underground and containing some last vestige of human magic that could end the war forever.  No one really believed the tales, but that didn’t explain why the East Claw Coalition and the vampires were suddenly so hell-bent on finding it, and by all accounts they had.  Meldoar had to get to it first, but not until a powerful but secretive contact was ready to give them the information they sought.  Until then, they waited, and hoped they’d be able to move before it was too late.