Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (44 page)

The New Koth forces would be the first they had to deal with.  The undead approached from the southern alleys, and before long the Ebon Kingdom’s unit Cross had mentioned would arrive from the northern part of city.  Every other road to the domed temple’s courtyard was blocked off with high stone walls and iron girders, and even fliers would have to navigate narrow crevices and razor-sharp palisades that would hopefully slice their wings to ribbons.

A last stand
, Danica thought, and a chill ran up her spine.  All they’d been through, all she’d seen, from the backwoods bunker and abusive family she’d grown up with to life as a mercenary, then a Revenger, then a mercenary again.  She’d done plenty of things she wasn’t proud of, things she could never erase from her memory no matter how hard she tried.  She’d learned to trust, learned to hope, learned the true meaning of pain and learned what she had to do to carry on.  And she’d done some good in her time, in spite of herself.

Now is as good a time to die as any.

Cross was by her side.  He grabbed her hand and held her close.  Her heart swelled.  She looked at him; they both had tears in their eyes.  They kissed, desperately, knowing it might be the last time.

Guns firing and claws bared, the New Kothian attackers blazed into the courtyard.  At the point where the forces met came a savage bloodletting.  The Vuul were at the front of Bloodhollow’s forces, and they met battle-armored zombies and mercenary war wights head on without fear, their war cleavers splitting corpses in two. 

The New Kothian infantry pressed on, remorseless. Razor claws and rived blades sawed through the stalwart Vuul.  Swords wielded by grinning Scarecrows tore through the lines and 20mm shells ripped into the ranks, severing limbs and spattering black-blood and grey flesh in a cacophony of noise. 

The Vuul fought on, teeth bared and grey muscles flexing.  Mauls and swords and hammers cracked through moldered skulls.

War mages, warlocks and witches from the wastelands linked hands and sent bolts of dark light into the New Koth mass, setting corpses alight and igniting rows of bodies.  Decayed husks folded in on themselves, immolated and cracked to pieces.

Danica fired with abandon as she moved to the front.  Noise and faces, blood and explosions.  Her spirit swept out in a wave, a battery force of red power like a tide of molten blood.  Bloodhollow warriors fell in behind her as she swept an arc ahead.  Her spirit tore Scarecrows down and smashed through a line of war wights, crumpling their armor inward until their bodies were crushed.

Cross slashed through wights and zombies like a man possessed.  Dark blood stained his face and he moved like a demon, swinging his dual blade with deadly accuracy.  He growled as he hacked into a Scarecrow’s midsection, leapt through the air and brought a clawed zombie to the ground. 

They were losing ground and falling back.  The New Koth undead were too strong.

Chaos from the entry road, thaumaturgy and gunfire.  Bloodhollow soldiers, more of them, bow and blade-armed Lith in dark leather armor, chain-yielding Vuul and humans with guns.  Danica saw Ronan cleave through enemies with his katana. 

She felt energy snap through her.  They had the Kothians in a cross-fire, and she screamed for everyone to fall back and shoot low to avoid hitting their comrades.

But the line started to fall, even with Ronan and Lucan’s force at the Kothian’s backs.  Too many had died, and the ground was soaked through with blood.  Zombies and war wights pressed on, driven by turncoat vampires now in service to New Koth, their buzzing machetes drenched with Vuul and human remains. 

Something in the air grabbed her attention.  Danica looked up and saw Lucan and Shiv floating over the battle, their arms folded together.  Light dripped from them like cold grease.  Danica felt something tense, like the air has frozen solid, in the moment before they struck.

Lucan opened his mouth and howled, a grim and heart-stopping noise that deadened the atmosphere like they’d been dropped underwater.  Sound distorted, images rippled away.  Everything was made distant. 

Shiv moved closer, seemingly unaffected by the sluggish atmosphere.  The Koth undead raised their weapons, but before they could fire Shiv brought down a cavalcade of destruction.  Spirits erupted from her hands, twisted like sabers.  They burst Scarecrow’s faces and crushed their bodies into twisted sacks of bone and meat.  She moved into their ranks like a whirlwind of invisible blades, slicing through corpses with her bare hands.  Dank light surrounded her, a corrosive field that splayed vampires and burned them to black husks before their cartwheeling corpses even hit the ground. 

Every motion she made was perfect, a careful dance.  She twisted, sliced through a wight’s skull, motioned with a hand and sprayed bodies apart.  The vampires tried to converge on her but their motions were slow, made sluggish by the rippling effect Lucan conjured, an air turned sodden and thick.  Ghosts screamed through the air and came to Shiv’s aid, spirits of the wastelands, a horde of lost souls from this time and other times, the tortured remains of those millions slaughtered by The Black.  Her body became a halo of itself, an echo of ghost-burn images that circled and surrounded her, an angel of flames and edges.  Vampires decapitated, a Scarecrow sliced in two.  She leapt up and came down, and as her feet touched earth a wave of fire spread away from her body like an explosion, blasting through undead and tearing them apart with licks of razored flame. 

Danica and Cross fought on.  They hacked through the undead driven back by Shiv’s gruesome display and cut them down from behind.  Bullets brought down those few that escaped the Kindred’s wrath. 

They met the other Bloodhollow fighters at the middle, closed the line between the enemy as the New Koth forces were slaughtered from both ends.  The ground was a steaming field of blackened bone and burning flesh, dismantled armor and grinning skulls.  Clouds of ash and blood hung in the air. 

Everything was still, but only for a moment.  A cry of alarm went up.  She heard a heavy shot, like something out of a cannon.

The vampires were there, the force Cross had told her about before.  Danica saw their leader, a tall revenant with stringy blonde hair sticking out from behind a solid iron mask, with dark eyes and a grill plate where the mouth should have been.  His blue and white armor was covered with serrated edges, and he held a short sword and a smoking hand-cannon.

Lucan was down.  It took her a moment to realize it, but the revenant leader had shot Keth, and now the mage lay on the ground, surrounded by his people as he coughed and sputtered blood.  The wound in his chest was enormous, a gaping and bloody hole.

“
I am Reaver,” the revenant spoke, his voice tinny and distorted and yet familiar somehow, a hollow echo of something she’d heard before.  “And now you die.”

Shiv turned, and Danica and Cross and Ronan stepped up behind her.  The Bloodhollow forces had pulled Lucan back and stood between the Ebon Kingdom’s assault team and the temple, but they were broken and weary, their ranks thinned.  Warfield and Felix emerged and looked bloodied, as they’d dealt with the undead who’d broken through, and now they stood at the edge of the courtyard with magic and guns ready.

Behind Reaver stood dozens of armored vampires with swords and scimitars and bone rifles, war-wights with sharpened claws, Magewraiths, a kaithoren.  A slavering host of undead assailants, dark armor and rotting flesh, sharpened teeth and dripping slime.  Their gruesome ranks outnumbered those of the defenders by at least twice.

If Lucan dies, all of this was for nothing.

“No,” Shiv said quietly, and yet her words carried force, like they’d been bellowed by some enormous creature of the deeps. 

Danica felt a rumbling.  There was a crack, like static, and a hum in the air.  Shiv’s body shimmered with ice blue light.  She seemed displaced, separate from everything else, and the corona of unfire darkened to cobalt, the echo of wings grew edged.  She was unstuck in time.

Shiv moved with such insane speed Danica didn’t even see the motion until the girl was already deep in the vampire’s ranks.  The torrent of spirits moved with her, a spiraling wave.

Power exploded away from her body.  Danica and Cross and Ronan and the rest of the Bloodhollow defenders charged ahead in her wake.  Air rushed into Danica’s lungs, adrenaline pumped through her veins.  Blood had caked against her face.  Her spirit filled her with strength and the blades filled her with bloodlust.  Cross and Ronan howled as they all crashed into the enemy line.

Explosive noise, metal crashed against metal, torn flesh and crushed bones.  Blood sprayed, guns fired.  The air was a catastrophe of noise. 

Danica battled through the mass.  Her golem arm crushed skulls and vampire breastplates as she cleaved through pale flesh with her blade.  Cross and Ronan were at her side, forcing their way through opponents in a haze of swords and blood.

Shiv was at the head of it all, ghostly and merciless.  Flames ripped through the Ebon Kingdoms undead.  She motioned and spirits responded, and they chopped through foes in spiraling and deadly whips of light, left and right, up and down, the stabs savage and fast.  She cut through leering dead faces and smashed bodies to pieces in an orgy of violence.

The wounds piled up.  Bloodhollow men were carved and lacerated, undead were taken down and smashed until they could no longer move.  A man took a blade in his face, another was bitten and had his throat ripped out by a vampire commando.  Ronan skewered a war-wight and cut it in two.  Cross fired a shotgun and blew off a vampire’s face. 

Shiv mowed through the ranks, as did Reaver, moving with impossible speed and power, a juggernaut of vengeance.  Forearm blades sliced into flesh.  Blood and screams weltered up around him as he hammered through the Bloodhollow warriors.

Both sides were nearly broken.  The vampires fell by the dozen, but it wasn’t enough. 

Danica and her spirit lashed out in a desperate whirlwind.  She was surrounded, so she blasted her enemies with a burst of red fire.  She moved with a fury she’d never known.  Thoughts of failure spurned her, people she’d lost, Cole, Kane, Maur.  Memory of them filled her with rage. 

The courtyard was a mist of blood blown by a bladed wind.  Men and undead lie torn on the floor, limbs and body parts skittered everywhere.  Danica was covered in red and black.  She saw Cross, his bloody face twisted in a feral snarl.

Shiv faced the Magewraiths, and with a swift stroke of her phantom weapon opened them up and sent their rotting insides to the ground; even before they fell she cleaved through the kaithoren, spattered its undulating mass into a thousand drops, and then a flamewraith, which she bound in a shroud and misdirected its attack so a line of napalm tore through the rear vampire ranks and melted them in place. 

Reaver came at Danica savagely.  She was barely able to deflect his first strike when his second sliced into her ribcage with a flash of impossible pain.  Her spirit launched down the revenant’s throat and burned him from the inside out.  Cross attacked Reaver savagely and put Soulrazor/Avenger through his back.  Ronan stepped in with his katana and sliced across the undead warrior’s armored face, ripping the mask away.

Danica screamed when she saw what lie beneath.  When Ronan and Cross could see what she did they backed away and let Reaver’s body crash to the ground.

She fell, her vision dizzy.  Her spirit desperately worked to seal the wound, to pack the torn flesh back into place.  Strength drained from her body, but she felt the injury healing, felt the cracked bones roughly snap back where they belonged. 

The battle was done.  There was more fighting off in the distance, bomb blasts as Coalition forces and Ebon Kingdoms regulars fought on in the streets, but the courtyard was secure. 

The sudden, cold solidity of the air was jarring.  There weren’t many survivors, maybe a dozen Bloodhollow men in addition to herself, Cross, Ronan, Warfield and Felix.  All of them were covered with blood – they were like gory ghosts standing stunned on a field of carnage.  Torn and ruined bodies, spattered organs, torn limbs, smoking undead husks, shredded armor, broken blades, smoldering flames, all of it stinking of death and stained with blood.  Danica breathed deeply, dripping with other’s remains.

She fell into Cross’s arms, and he held her close.  Exhaustion swept through her like a wave of water.  She’d never been so tired.

She stared down at Reaver’s body. 
Kane’s
body. 

He was barely recognizable.  His once thick hair was thinned and peeled away from his rotting scalp, and the skin had tightened and sank down to his bones, clinging like leather.  The body had been augmented, metal and bone reinforced with arcane metals, and the armor he wore appeared fused to his dead flesh, making him taller than before, more imposing. 

But it was unquestionably
him
.  The shape of his jaw, his eyes, still as blue in death as when he’d been alive.  That voice, distant and tinny though it had been, was one she’d known.

Now he lie still, armor torn open by the blades of his former companions.  His friends.

“My God...” Cross says.  “Dani...”

Danica’s tears came in violent bursts.  She could no longer hold them in.  Everything, the fighting, the war, all she’d lost came crashing in on her, and it was all she could do to hold on to Cross as she nearly stumbled and fell.