Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (41 page)

He knows who he is.  Or at least who he used to be.

I can’t let her die.  Not again.

But the moment passes.  He feels Drake’s will force him onwards, and with renewed vigor Reaver slices through humans and drives towards Bloodhollow’s core with a force of vampires at his back.

TWENTY-TWO

BLIND

Blood trails down the icy banks like dark rivers and burns through the grey crust of snow, releasing pockets of rancid steam. 

She stands in a forest.  The sky is pale and deep, dappled with clouds that look like smears, and the air is bitingly cold.  All she wears is a loose, pale dress.  Her hair is slicked back against her scalp and her skin is icy blue, darker than it used to be.  Frosted runes and tribal tattoos line her naked forearms, and her wrists are bound in ringlets of bones.  Her feet sink in the ice and slush, and she shivers uncontrollably.

Things lumber through the dead forest.  Low ebon fog seems to burn the ground.  The trees go on forever, a labyrinth of frozen cedars and petrified pines. 

She hears the ice crack beneath her.  Her breaths cloud the air as she cautiously steps forward, desperate not to disturb the eerie stillness that has such a stranglehold on the nightmare region.

A nightmare
, Shiv realizes. 
I’m not awake. 
The thought does little to comfort her.

Something like a sun passes overhead, but it’s far too distant and pale, a frozen teardrop in the slate of sky.  The things draw closer, and she realizes they’re creatures, humanoids, but not human.  Dark cloaks and icy blades, frozen eyes and black crusted skin that flecks off like bits of soot.  They are soundless, and they are legion.  She moves to avoid them, but she sees them in every direction, derelict dead things set to block her path. 

Fear ices up her spine.  The sky lenses in like a shard of burned glass.  Desperate, she calls for the spirits, hoping they’ll be there, but she’s alone.
 
She runs.

Hands reach up from out of the earth, clawing the dress and nearly tripping her.  She tears away, her heart pounding.  Something snarls on her clothes, a rotten branch that tries to grasp her, but she pushes away from the dead forest and into the barren plains. 

She finds herself at the edge of a frozen sea.  She doesn’t recall getting there.  The forest is gone and she’s here at this broken coast, where jags of bone and razor coral protrude from the glassy surface.  Dead things are trapped there, bats and birds and children, beating against the pane of the lake with wings and hands turned bloody and raw.  The liquid beneath the sheet is turgid and thick with muck and grease.  Shiv backs away, fear clutching her stomach.

Why am I here?

She looks up from the dead things pounding against the ice and sees the ghosts, an armada of derelict spirits, green and molten, dripping their way across the sea like they’re melting wax.  A few have distinctive features, but most of them don’t – they can only appear as they remember themselves, and most have lost their minds after having been exiled from the living world for so long.  Their faces are incomplete, sometimes missing, and their forms are shifting and unstable, riddled with mongrel limbs or connected to things they remember from life, books or mementos or trinkets grafted to their bodies.  The stench that wafts away from their ranks is mortifying, a rolling tide of rot and decay.  Their voices call into the wind, call for
her
, for the one who vowed to protect them but failed. 

I’m sorry!
she screams, but they can’t hear her, because she has no voice in this place.  Everything special about her has been stripped away.

Again she turns, and runs.

She comes across a massive tree stripped of its bark but laden with black leaves.  Shiv doesn’t know what to make of it, and it takes her long moments to realize she’s again shifted to some other nightmare.  She recalls the Maloj, remembers seeing it under the ice, remembers Mace having her tortured so her spirits would reveal Bloodhollow’s secrets.

I shouldn’t be here.

It was her fault.  She never should have driven Ronan away.  He’d seen how desperate she’d become, what lengths she was willing to go to in order to end her pain.  The voices had become too much, and they were driving her mad.  In desperation she’d turned to him for help, hoping, begging him to do what she couldn’t. 

The spirits protected her no matter what, even from herself. 
He
could do it.

But he wouldn’t.  Ronan, who she felt certain would understand her pain, told her it wasn’t her decision to make, that the White Mother had chosen her for a reason, that Cross and Danica and everyone else had died to ensure she’d fulfill some purpose. 

That was when he’d decided to leave.  She had the White Children.  They would fight their war against the vampires without him.  If she was going to have someone help her take her own life, it wouldn’t be him.

What a fool I’ve been.

Shiv watches the tree.  It reminds her of something Cross told her, something that held meaning to him, a place where he and his sister had gone before she’d died.  Shiv wonders if it’s the same tree, if that city she suddenly sees in the distance is Thornn.

“
You were easier to break than I’d hoped,”
a voice says
.

Shiv turns, reaching for a weapon and calling on wastelands spirits that aren’t there.  The hairless woman before her is alabaster pale, the same hue as the icy fields and lifeless sky.  The ears are sharp, at least as edged as her pure black fangs.  There’s little human about her save her shape.  Her eyes are large and black, her skin leathery, textured.  Her armor is as white as her flesh, and thin traces of oil-dark blood trail from the corners of her mouth.

“Who are you?”
Shiv asks, trying to sound brave but failing.

“
The destroyer of your world,”
the woman says. 
“I wanted to introduce myself, meet you in the flesh.  Few have had that pleasure…you should feel blessed.”

“
Fuck you,”
Shiv spits
,
and the woman laughs. 

“
You have spirit,”
she says,
“but you’re not very original.  And to think of how much promise you once had.”

The woman turns and looks out over the plains.  Something is happening. 

Shiv feels dwarfed by the shifting landscape.  Great ruptures and cracks form in the ice as jagged glaciers push like mountains in the distance.  Cracks explode like lightning bolts across the face of the world, breaking open rich dark rifts which scissor-cut their way from horizon to horizon.  Gouts of steam erupt into the ice-white sky, and before Shiv’s eyes they solidify into monuments of frozen smoke, gelid towers twisted like frozen serpents.  The sun darkens, begins to drop, and the air shifts from storm to calm.

“
One thing changes a hundred others,”
the woman hisses, her voice heavy and full of rasp, like she gurgles blood. 
“Chain reactions.  Set one thing in motion to affect another.  And another.  And another.” 
She turns back to Shiv and smiles.  Black blood dribbles down her chin, a stark contrast to her paleness. 
“Affecting weylines, probabilities.  Gazing through futures possible and pasts mutable, rotating events, stealing people from one place and inserting them into another, affecting a change I’ll control.”

“
You’re insane...”
Shiv says, but the woman smiles and turns back to watch the exploding landscape.  Great breaks in the ice sound with dull booms so fierce Shiv feels the shockwaves even from miles away.  The air thickens into a sort of liquid and turns black, oil in water. 

“
I was born of such a rift,”
the woman says. 
“Others shifting lines, affecting probabilities by manipulating events.  They sought to escape the Maloj, sought to end their wars, but they didn’t anticipate what would come about.  Dimensional folds, temporal ruptures.  Realities pasted on top of each other, shifted, shaken, shattered and left on the floor.  New worlds born, sometimes cleanly, often not.” 
Her voice thickens.  It’s hard for Shiv to tell, but the creature sounds like it’s suddenly in some sort of emotional distress, like it’s recalling a painful memory. 
“Creatures are born in those ruptures,”
she says. 
“Rampant life force gives rise to spontaneous creations.  No parents, not really.  Just a cursed thing, wrapped in the primordial fluid of discarded worlds, an embryo sack formed by thousands of lives lost all at once, a soup of the dead, collapsing energies combusting to give rise to new life.” 
She turns to face Shiv and she’s entirely different, transformed in the blink of an eye, one moment that pale woman and a spider the next, monstrous and grotesque, moon-pale legs and solid black crystal eyes, razor limbs scraping the ground, growing larger by the second, a monstrous arachnid bulk which looms like a darker sunset.

Shiv screams, and backs away.

“Life like me,”
the spider says.  Its voice is quiet and calm.  The air is suddenly rancid with cold, and the sky darkens.  Everything shifts, turns sepia.  Shiv feels small, like she’s about to be smothered. 
“I shape lives, other’s lives, the lives most likely to matter.  Lives like Eric Cross.  Confluent energies generated by alterations in the probability fold, the temporal dissonance.  New things rise.”

Shiv shakes her head, tries to drown out the voice.  Something shifts behind her, and she sees with horror that the black leaves on the tree are really crinkling flesh made dark with blood.  They unfold and grow until they’re the size of manta rays, which hover in the air between her and the dead city. 

“You are here by my design,”
the spider says. 
“And you will do my bidding.”

The dripping shards of floating skin fold out around Shiv’s body.  She screams.

She woke alone on a field of snow. 

Her skin was frosted and scaled with scars, and her fingers and toes ached like they’d been dipped in acid.  She could barely sit up.  Icy wind blasted across her face and ripped open scabs.  Shiv cried, and her tears froze almost instantly.

She looked around.  There was no one, and nothing, not for miles.  She’d been abandoned, left alone with her fate.  At first she thought she was still dreaming, or dreaming again, but the world was real – she felt the snow crust between her naked toes as she stood up, felt pain jolt up and down her legs as she stumbled along through the arctic wind.

They’d left her to die.  The voices were silent.  She was alone, just like in the dream.  Just she and the wastes.

Her fingers and toes were turning black.  Shiv stumbled forward, her clothes too thin to offer any protection.  There was nowhere to go.

I’ve failed
, she thought.  She thought of all of the people she’d let down, of the spirits who’d trusted her, who’d looked to her for salvation in a world they could no longer understand.

Shiv walked across the frozen fields.  She didn’t know how far she made it before she fell to her knees, ice sticking to her hair and body.  Her limbs were so frozen she could barely feel them.  Her hands shook, and pain lanced across her skin.

I can’t
, she thought. 
I won’t.

You will
, a voice said.  It was a voice she knew.

Why?  I’ve failed.  I have nothing now, I
am
nothing.

That’s not true
, the voice said. 
Keep faith, child.  I chose you for a reason. 

Shiv started to cry.  She didn’t see the giant’s approach until he was almost there with her, didn’t see the people with him.  Shiv collapsed in on herself even as she was scooped up and felt heat pour back into her body. 

They took her to shelter and wrapped her in blankets.  The frostbite and weakness and toxins were purged from her system by powerful magic, magic that seemed somehow familiar. 

She just wanted it to be over.  She was tired of all the pain.  Shiv wanted to go home, but there was no home, and never would be again.

Darkness.  She couldn’t see, and couldn’t feel.  It had been long since she’d known such peace.

She felt presences in the blackness around her, that void of her soul.  They were silent, but familiar.  People she’d loved, people she missed.  For all the hundreds of spirits she’d encountered there were precious few whose loss had actually affected her.  Her father.  Cross.  Danica.  Creasy.

Ronan.  Her black prince, her dark knight.  The pain of losing him cut deepest, because she’d driven him away.

She floated in a liquid reality she couldn’t comprehend, and didn’t want to.  Something enveloped her.  Her body drifted in darkness, insulated.  Something hissed softly.  She felt no pain, and for the first time in a long time she knew no fear.

Awake.

Shiv inhaled deeply and opened her eyes.  All was dark and still.  She was in a shallow pool fed by dripping obsidian columns.  The room was warm and dark, a stone chamber with no windows.  Her body shook as she tried to stand.  She was naked, but clothes were there, simple pants, a loose shirt, a cloak.  The air smelled of musk and age, cool against her body.