Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (19 page)

Reaver moves fast, firing as he runs.  The warship is down, leaning against the side of the hill, but one of the massive turbines still functions, spinning in place and blasting out enough air and power to keep the ship unsteadily afloat even though its front end is nestled against the rock.  The top-mounted guns swivel around, fire desperately as the engines seize in and out like a shrieking metal child.  The angle is bad, and Reaver easily ducks beneath the blasts. 

He comes under the shadow of the vehicle and fires up at it.  Bullets tear into the metal.  Reaver sees a gap, a chink in the armored body, and quickly tosses in an incendiary grenade.  His undead muscles carry him fast up the side of the hill.

The explosion rips through the air behind him, and chunks of steel and debris fall to the ground.  The turbines come dislodged and launch rotary blades which sink into the stone with sickening force.  Heat from the blast sweeps against his back.  Reaver is thrown forward against the slope.  A cloud of dust sweeps over him as a final resounding boom echoes across the morning sky.

He holds her in his arms.  The wound in her chest is deep, and blood pushes out of her pale skin like a fountain.  She isn’t entirely human anymore, so the blood is pale, and there isn’t much of it left. 

Tears stream down his face.  She’s all he’s ever loved, all he’s ever wanted, and now she’s gone.  He has nothing left.

Reaver’s eyes open.  He stares up into a purple-black sky riddled with ragged clouds.  Dust settles around him, as pale as the surface of the moon.  Sound is distant, distorted, like he’s slipped underwater. 

He sits up.  The smoothed bowl has become a ruined rockscape.  Metal debris lies scattered across scorched earth, covered with spilled fuel and human remains.  Slivers of steel jut from the soil like dark spines. 

Sound returns.  Reaver hears calls for help, a human voice.  There are other voices, vampire voices, the call of the Ebon Kingdoms collective, distant, faded, like an echo from a dream. 

Where the ground is torn the earth reveals things long since buried, now unearthed.  Reaver can’t fathom how the bones got there – an entire layer of them lie beneath the basalt and limestone crust, a shore of skeletal ruin that has been paved over with sea-washed rock.  Tunnels bear down into the earth, corridors of blanched white.  The ground smells of seaweed and grave soil.

“Help...” the voice calls out, weak, afraid.  Reaver follows it. 

The warship went down hard, but even though the fuel tanks have exploded and the turbines flown to pieces much of the cockpit remains intact, shattered against the slope, smoke and fluid leaking from its cracked shell.  The sky grows darker; Reaver isn’t sure how much time has passed since the explosion.  If the Coalition has any reinforcements they’ll be on the way soon. 

A woman sits in the hatch, her blonde hair pasted to her face with sweat.  She’s young, with bright green eyes and blood smeared down one side of her face and neck.  Her jumpsuit is torn down the leg, and her injured calf muscle oozes blood and dark puss.  Her safety harness seems to be stuck, locking her in place. 

Something about her is familiar.  Reaver tries to shake the feeling

it’s bad to remember

it’s been too long since your mind has been erased

but it’s impossible to ignore.

Reaver looks around.  He hears vehicles in the distance, droning aircraft, but with the burning of the ruined vessels and the echoing quality of the crater it’s difficult to tell if they’re drawing closer or not.  He knows they’ll be there soon.

He tries to reach out to the collective, to find Lord Drake or any of the theurges at Basilisk Claw, but there’s nothing.  His vampire tech has been damaged and he can’t communicate to the vampires, even if their voices play quietly in the back of his head like a radio signal that won’t come clear. 

Harpy is gone.  All of the others are gone.  Reaver is without his team, without contact to his masters.  A sense of uncertainty settles over him. 

APPREHEND, the original message had said.  PROCEED TO BLOODHOLLOW.

He knows where he is, knows where to rendezvous with the Ebon Kingdoms Wing.  It’s too far to go back.  If he can locate a transmitter at one of the roving outposts he can figure out a way to get a message back to the vampires so he can transmit his situation and receive further instructions.

Reaver hesitates, and watches the woman.  Her eyes are open, locked on him with fear.  She searches for a weapon, but finds none.

He stares at her, and without thinking rips the hatch away and slices open her harness.  She doesn’t have the strength to resist as he hoists her over his shoulder and scrambles up the side of the slope, moves out of the clearing and heads north, towards Bloodhollow.

NINE

RAZE

Year 35 A.B. (After the Black)

10 A.S.C. (After Southern Claw)

A creature stalked the lands of ash and dust.  The shells of old buildings creaked in the bitter wind, and mounds of bones had cracked and frozen into chunks of ice.  Skeletons stood at attention near the remnants of the road, propped up on poles and held in place by wires and nails, their empty sockets staring out to a pale and lifeless desert.

The beast moved cautiously.  Bloodcats normally didn’t travel this far north but confined themselves to the Bone Hills or Blackmarsh, but the prevalent number of Bloodwolves and vampires had thinned the population and driven them north, to climes they were ill-suited for. 

The creature was the size of a horse, lean and muscular, with an enormous chest and forelegs bristling with grey-black fur turned white by soiled ice and sleet.  Fangs like rows of broken razors glinted in the moonlight.  Its eyes darted to and fro as it watched for signs of potential prey.  It had been days since the predator had fed. 

The Reach was one of the coldest and most desolate regions in all the world.  The winds howled day and night, tossing great drifts of grey and ancient snow that filled valleys and long-dried lakes.

Ronan hid near an old farmhouse half-concealed by a petrified snow drift.  The crumbling outer walls were crusted with rime, and the inside was as dark and cold as a tomb.  He dressed warm in thick wools, a face-wrap, goggles and gloves, all grey-white like the snow.  As always Ronan moved silent and swift and kept out of sight.  He disguised his scent with wilderness grime and breathed slow and even, maintaining the self-control he’d been taught as a youth, when the mystics of the Crimson Triangle had taken a little boy and turned him into a monster. 

The Bloodcat was a good two hundred meters out, moving slow, its razorine purr echoing like silvered metal, just barely audible over the whine of the wind.  Ronan knelt low as he moved and used the building as cover, keeping an old tractor between himself and the beast.  The wind was so bitterly cold he felt his blood thickening by the second, and even with as many layers as he wore he’d have to get inside soon before his fingers froze. 

His bow was in hand.  It was a Lith weapon, specially recurved and fit with a razor’s edge so it could be used if someone closed the gap.  He no longer even remembered where he’d gotten it; it reminded him of Grail, the Lith who’d been with them in Nezzek’duul.  The bow was one of the few weapons he and his fellow Initiates hadn’t been taught to use.  Ronan had killed men, women and other children with swords, knives, chains, guns, and his bare hands.  He’d once strangled a man with a length of wire, and beat another to death with an empty beer barrel.  But not until recently had he taught himself to use a bow.

Ronan steadied his hand as he knelt and twisted around the back of the tractor, setting himself so his left shoulder was against the rear of the vehicle and his drawing hand was outside.  The wind came from the north, and while that meant he was downwind it also meant he’d have to wait for a slow draft before he could fire, and he’d have to arc his shot perfectly.  He didn’t expect to kill the Bloodcat with a single arrow, but hopefully he’d do enough damage that he could move in and finish the bastard off quickly.

If we both don’t freeze to death first.

He breathed in, and waited. 

He remembered hiding outside a school as a boy and waiting for the children to be released, for one of his training exercises had been to kidnap and abuse a young girl and bring proof of the deed back to his superiors.  Ronan was sickened by himself, by what he’d done.  He’d spent years trying to atone for those crimes, for the things he’d been taught to do because his parents had disappeared and a wastelands slave trader thought the orphaned boy would make a fine prize for the cruel men of the Crimson Triangle. 

I wish I could remember you
, he thought, though he wasn’t entirely sure who the sentiment was directed at.  Maybe his parents, a hope to find something from his past that wasn’t soiled with torture and pain; more likely it was a vow to the slave trader who’d sold him, a foolish desire on his part to hunt the bastard down and kill him for what he’d done. 

It didn’t matter.  He’d have wound up here one way or another.  Ronan had been born a killer, and the Triangle had simply nurtured what was already inside him. 

He focused his mind and achieved a razor sense of clarity.  He couldn’t stay in the Deadlands for long, especially in light of his recent experiences there, but he knew without it he didn’t have a chance in hell of making the shot with the bow.  He felt the creature’s heartbeat in the distance, sensed its blood moving like a slow black river.  The beat faded, echoed.  The Bloodcat seemed to draw closer, as if the ground between them vanished. 

The wind calmed, and Ronan let himself fall into darkness.  The air shifted grey, twisted to a fold of iron smoke filled with a sound like chattering teeth.  The heart grew louder, nearly deafening, a hollow and heavy thing pulsing with thick fluid, slowed because of some sickness the creature had contracted, a cancer or infection which gradually poisoned its blood. 

He breathed out, but held steady.  Ronan’s fingers slowly eased the arrow back, and he lowered the bow as a hard gust of wind lashed the area with sharp blades of snow.  He huddled behind the tractor and bundled himself against the cold. 

The Bloodcat carried on across the wastes, alone with its disease.  Ronan knew he could have cut around those gangrenous areas with ease, but he chose not to. 

There was no point in killing the cat.  It was already dead, and just didn’t know it.

Ronan traveled south across plains of bitter ice.  Frost boils held petrified rodents and occasional lost travelers in their glacial grip, and he passed clefts in the earth carved by hostile winds and long-frozen rivers. 

There were few signs of civilization; Karamanganji was far to the east, and nothing had resided in Shul Ganneth for years, though it was that temple, once devoted to the Maloj, where he decided to stop for the night.  It wasn’t a choice location, and he knew it had some history for the team from before his time with them, but he wouldn’t let sentiment stop him from getting out of the wind.  He’d already allowed his conscience to cheat him out of fresh meat for the night.

Shul Ganneth was squat and ugly, a rounded dome of an outpost covered with gaping holes.  Frozen water and shattered stones surrounded the base of the city, and the path to the entrance was lined with strange statues of broken humans, their faces frozen in agony and their bodies twisted into mockeries of religious penitence.  They seemed to watch him as he passed down the ice-crusted path.

He soon stood before crumbled redoubts built by maddened sorcerers.  Ronan saw vague outlines of wolfen monuments, jagged buildings curved like blades and pits filled with broken pottery.  Nothing was distinct, like the laws of reality weren’t as solid there.  The edges of time-ruined buildings and shattered streets jutted from the darkness like flotsam on the surface of an oil sea.

Ronan kept his blade in hand, let his vision pierce the shadows.  He had to be careful not to step into the Deadlands unless absolutely necessary, but he doubted it would be.  Most of what he saw and heard were remnants of old hexes, defensive measures the baser Maloj had placed on their fortress to keep their enthralled slaves and citizens in line.  He’d faced those weaker wolfen and found them just as easy to kill as anything else he’d ever encountered.  It was the true Maloj who were the threat, the true danger.  The ones he feared.  Shiv had vanquished one, and another had been destroyed by the Ebon Kingdoms, but the last still roamed the world somewhere, and Ronan knew he’d find it, given time.

Deeper in the city his boots crushed salt-encrusted ash and snow that had petrified so it resembled bone marrow.  The cold was deep and biting, like passing through a curtain of blades, and every breath he released sent sharp and dissonant sounds through the deeper dark.  He knew there was nothing there, sensed he was alone even though he felt eyes on him.

He found the center of the city, an open yard filled with collapsed towers.  Cracks in the rock dome overhead offered view of the blood-milk sky.  The busts of great statues, tumbled columns and piles of rubble lay scattered on the ground. 

He came across the remains of bodies, a Doj and a few humans, the corpses still clinging to long frozen weapons, their flesh and wounds petrified by the cold.  Predators were too afraid to enter this place due to how unnatural it felt.