Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (22 page)

Hasker was at the center of it all, short and slim, bald and severe, too thin to be a warrior but far too death-like to be anything else.  He didn’t drink, didn’t smile, just stood at the edge of the stone terrace and stared out over the city.

Cross walked up to him. 

“
Yeah?” he asked brusquely.

Hasker snickered. 

“Who do you think you’re impressing with this act?”

“
I’m
fairly impressed,” he said. “But I’m easy to please.”  The clouds and smoke were so thick they couldn’t see more than a few city blocks away.  Night had been built atop a sloped and unstable hill, the roads twisted to match its unorthodox topography, the buildings alternating in height to accommodate for the uneven ground.

“
I don’t find you funny,” Hasker said, still not looking at Cross.

“
That’s too bad, because I think you’re hilarious.”

“
Good,” Hasker said.  “Then you’ll find this particularly amusing.  General Wulf is dispatching an advanced force to head to Bloodhollow.  The information you acquired from the vampire confirms other reports we’ve already received of the city’s whereabouts.  You’re to accompany me and my unit.”

Shit
, Cross thought.  Wulf wasn’t screwing around – he was deploying his most formidable warriors.  Hasker’s unit, The Bloody Teeth, had a bad reputation in an army built on bad reputations.  Cross had dreams of making Hasker pay for some of the things he’d seen those men do.  Their cruelty knew no bounds: they weren’t soldiers, just sadists with guns.

“
No quip?” Hasker asked.  “No snappy comeback.”

“
I just learned I have to go traipsing into a war zone and sleep under a tent with
you
,” Cross said.  “Not much needs to be added.”

Possibilities raced through his mind.  They’d be going near Meldoar, which meant maybe he could figure out a way to get word to Danica.  Maybe there was a chance, however slim, that he’d figure a way out his situation without getting her killed.

“Get some rest,” Hasker said.  “We leave at first light.” 

Cross walked away without a word.  His breath caught in his chest.  He should have felt a spark of hope, but he was more frightened than ever.

ELEVEN

FORGOTTEN

Year 35 A.B. (After the Black)

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

Vehicles sputtered across the broken wilderness, four armored dune buggies and one small airship they’d purchased off a black market dealer in Blacksand.  Shiv remembered strongly disliking the man, but the vehicle had proved useful, and with their limited resources the White Children needed all of the help they could get.

She rode with Ione, another witch, in one of the dune buggies.  Normally Mace insisted she fly, claiming it was safer, but Shiv was sick of flying.  She’d never liked it much to begin with – she’d always felt more comfortable closer to earth.

The landscape was blunt and ugly and full of clouds of smoke and gas.  Her breathing filter tightly hugged her face and she swore the goggles were just tight enough that they seemed to be slowly crushing her skull. 

She spied empty settlements in the distance.  Abandoned vehicles littered the desert like shells on a shore.  The sky was clear and cold, while the land was brown and dead.  They drove fast across the region east of the ruins of Ath and north of the Nightblood River, careful to keep to the shallow valleys and only moving during the daylight in the hopes of avoiding vampire patrols.  They were just inside the Ebon Kingdoms borders but far enough from the outposts they could elude notice, at least for a time. 

The air was full with dead wind and mongrel smells.  Shiv focused, tried to keep the voices of the forgotten at bay.  They hounded her, screamed for her, their sundered souls tied to the landscape like tethered animals.   The smell and touch of those unquiet spirits spilled in towards her, smeared her consciousness.  It took all of her concentration to block them out.

I wish this would get easier. 
It wasn’t – it was getting harder.  The older she got the more difficult it became, and like a warlock she feared eventually her own so-called gift would destroy her.

“
You okay?” Ione asked.  The Mexican woman’s arms were painted in vivid tribal tattoos, a conglomerate of collapsing blades and female angels strewn together by barbed wire.  Her eyes were soft green like the lights on the console, and more than once Shiv wondered how many hearts she’d broken, for she was a truly beautiful creature.

“
Yes,” Shiv said, not caring how much her voice sounded like she was lying, because she was.  “I’m fine.” 

Ione gave her a look, but said nothing more. 

The procession raised dust as they traveled across the desert.  Spined bushes and fractured trees rattled and fell.  The region grew more stark with each passing mile, a flat vista of oily red and white like snow stained with blood and ashes mounded high.  They spied lines of towers, abandoned crenelations and forlorn strongholds long cleared of any occupants.  Blasted fields of rock and toppled monuments marked where civilization had once stood, but now the area smelled of burning metal and old tar.

They drove on, not stopping, their purpose set.  It was ironic that the entrance to Bloodhollow lie so close to Crucifix Point, that symbol of humankind’s failure to defend itself, and a testament to the vampire’s increased aggression.  No one had visited the site for several years even before the war had ended but numerous disturbances had originated from the region, spectral anomalies and random vanishings, unexplained time gaps and dimensional folds.  There were plenty of places that were equally unstable, especially in the south along the Ebon Coast, but that was to be expected in a world that had been ripped inside out and thrown back together with pieces of others, a patchwork assembly of random landscapes and ruined cities, sundered civilizations and ransacked realities.  Things vanished in those caustic zones, people and places, even time.  Caravans disappeared and were never seen again, but they didn’t go missing so much as they were
erased
, torn form reality and cast off so deep into the void between worlds it was as if they’d barely existed in the first place. 

Shiv felt herself fading.  For the first fifty miles her brain had rattled in her skull from the repetitive motion of the dune buggy and her back and butt were sore.  Gyver and Cask rode behind her and Ione, but no one really spoke except to ask for food or water.  They hadn’t had a pit stop in some time, but likely wouldn’t be resting for another hour. 

She kept herself alert even though she felt like she drifted half in a dream.  Everything she saw seemed drug out, like they left trails.  She focused so much of her mind on keeping those wastelands spirits at bay she only dimly registered anything else.  Dead trees seemed to walk, the blasted plains bled into one another.  Hills chattered like teeth. 

The further south they traveled the stronger the stench of the dead.  After another hour, right when the convoy was prepared to stop, they came across the bodies. 

Fields of them, scores, but not organized, not neat.  Corpses thrown together, piles and flames, limbs and innards splayed and left to freeze in the ashen snow that fell from some unseen fire in the grey heavens.  Lines of char linked those mounds of cadavers, and craters had been filled with wrecked airships and shards of vehicles.  Thick plumes of green-grey smoke pillared into the heavens and vanished before an onslaught of moldered wind.  The plains went on and on, no border and no end.  The horizon was a vague slash of black.              

They didn’t stop.  No one wanted to halt the vehicles while they traveled between those mounds of bodies.  They’d reach Pyramid Station by nightfall to refuel and gather supplies; Shiv wouldn’t be surprised if Mace insisted they wait until they reached the station to rest. 

The dead were fighters, mostly, Southern Claw corpses a decade old that had yet to fully decompose, likely preserved by some necrotic mist that allowed them to be more easily harvested for the ranks of the undead.  The dune buggies navigated around flesh piles and corpse dioramas. 

Shiv couldn’t focus: there were too many voices.  These bodies hadn’t been reanimated yet so their spirits lingered, trapped in this charnel field and clinging desperately to the ruined shells they’d once been tied to.  She should have said something, anything, begged the convoy to carry on faster or told those spirits to leave her in peace, but she couldn’t voice her fears, couldn’t speak.  No one knew to worry about her because no one knew she had this problem.

Shaking, Shiv tried to focus.  The dune buggy bobbed along, and Ione and the others watched the plains in shock and fear.  They must have thought Shiv was doing to the same and that was why she was huddled in on herself, holding her cloak tight and burying her ears and face in her hands as she curled there on the seat, tasting the dead in the wind. 

The voices were a drone, indistinct, nothing remotely identifiable as having once been human.  Just cries from the dark. 

She thought of her father, how he’d always held her and protected her.  How she wished he was there with her now.

Eventually, mercifully, they left the killing fields behind them.  The White Children passed through a bowl-shaped valley and down an old abandoned military road leading south out of the plains and into rocky lowlands. 

Shiv was shaken, and her head pounded.  She felt like she hadn’t eaten in weeks, and yet she was certain if she so much as smelled food it would make her wretch.  Ione knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what.  Shiv didn’t even realize they’d stopped until she heard Mace’s voice. 

Something happened then, some horror, some moment that escaped her.  Shiv lost time without understanding how, without even understanding it had happened.

She tried to open her eyes, but she couldn’t.  The pressure against her temples was too intense, like someone pressed bricks against the side of her head.  The darkness behind her eyes was absolute: she floated in an ocean of ink.

“
Where am I?” she asked.

“
Safe,” Mace said. 

She didn’t want to, but Shiv forced her eyes open and tried to sit up, but she couldn’t.  Everything was green and grey.  She was indoors, somehow, in a muted stone chamber filled with tall pillars and sputtering candles set in alcoves on the walls.  Had they reached Pyramid Station already? 

The air was chill and dead, like the inside of a tomb.  The scent of something sweet and burning filled her nostrils.  Her muscles were sore down to the bone, her head and neck stiff.  Everything seemed to shift and move even though she knew she was holding perfectly still.

The room came into sharper focus.  There was someone there with Mace, some cloaked figure, and then another.  Everything felt musky, and her hands were covered with grime.

Shiv focused, and suddenly recollection came.  Images bolted through her memory like blades.  Skin being peeled away, nails driven into skin.  She saw herself being stripped down naked and thrown into a hole.  At some point she’d been buried up to her arms and neck in soil, cold grey and still, some icy unguent that laced her skin with frost.  Her fingernails were filled with grit and her teeth were clogged with soft vegetation that tasted like seawater.

“
Mace!” she shouted, but her voice was distant and weak.

“
It’s okay,” he said.  “I’m here.”

He knelt down to where she lay on the ground, but he was different, painted with tribal markings, ritual and runic ink that made his leathery face look like script.  Even his fingers were marked, lines of arcane language cast down to the tips like refugee sentences.  His beard had been shorn and he looked many years younger.  He was dressed all in black, thick robes soiled by dirt and charcoal dust. 

“Mace...what’s going on?”

“
You’re awake,” he said.  “That’s not good.  It’s too soon for you to be awake.  We’ve only had you here for a few hours.”

Shiv tried to sit up, but found she lacked the strength.  Her limbs were so tired, her head filled with a sort of cloud like she’d been asleep for days.  Every time she tried to focus and form a thought things became fuzzy. 

She looked around.  Crates had been stacked in the corners of the chamber, which was lit only by flickering red torchlight.  The faces of the other men in the room were invisible beneath their soiled black cloaks.  She caught a glint of steel and heard a creak of something that wasn’t leather. 

“
What....?”  She couldn’t form the thought, couldn’t make herself ask questions.  “Mace...”

“
It’s okay, Shiv,” he said.  “You’re safe.  We’re with friends.”  He narrowed his eyes and smiled coldly.  “They’re going to help us defeat the Ebon Kingdoms.”

Shiv watched the nearest cloaked figure in fear.  She stared into the darkness of his face, waiting for him to come into focus, feeling herself drawn closer and closer towards a deep and heatless void.