Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (10 page)

Peaks seemed to ooze across the valley, slumbering titans of black rock and blue snow.  Even with the death on the riverbank a few shaggy horses roamed the edge of the milky waters, avoiding drink because of the undead but not in any danger themselves; they somehow knew the zombies would never feast on anything but other humans.

Rorn and Tam moved forward, down towards the riverbank opposite Wolftown.  The airship faded behind them, masked by snowbanks and shadows.  It was an older model, a Skyhawk built for speed with minimal armaments and armor, but thaumaturgic enchantments rendered the craft all but invisible to human and undead eyes and vampire technology. 

There was a klick of flat ground littered with scrub and low stones between the Children’s position and the edge of the river, and from there it was a few hundred feet across the sluggish waters to the undead-infested shore.  Thorns and briars twisted up through the mud near the muddy waters.  Rorn and Tam moved forward, two hardened mercenaries out of Blacksand, once-pirates turned freedom fighters, both of them seasoned military veterans wearing dark fatigues and cammo-lined skin. 

The shambling horde turned towards them as they neared the edge of the water.  Hundreds of dead grey eyes stared out from the far shore, unblinking.  Faces had been partially crushed and mottled hair clung to the greyed flesh like vines.  Teeth chattered from behind ripped lips, and the torn cheeks leaked maggots and slime.

The zombies sensed meat, and tried to move in for the kill.  Moldered bones creaked and dry throats rasped as the dead pushed towards the water, their bodies shoving into one another.  Rorn and Tam took turns firing controlled bursts to the heads, which sent the undead down in splatters of sickly meat.  Bodies bumped into one another as the mass of grinning cadavers shifted towards the river, pushing and knocking each other into the thick red sludge in their attempt to claw their way to the food on the other side.

Shiv felt a chill run down her skin as she strode towards the rocky shore.  Gyver and Moone were at her side, the blonde-haired engineer with his grenade launcher and the assassin with his twin blades, but it wasn’t their weapons which comforted her nearly so much as just their presence.  She’d had most everyone in the team at her side for several months, the longest she’d been able to keep a group in once piece without losing someone to their myriad of enemies.  They’d become familiar to her, and knowing they had her back made her job that much easier.

A rifle shot cracked from the ridge.  The barrel of Cask’s enormous Barrett smoked, and the tang of thaumaturgic energies Shiv sensed in the air indicated that the smiling and bald-headed Jahl had infused the .50 caliber round with his spirit’s explosive potential, marked by a grim green-blue signature which sparked the air with corrosive light.  The screaming missile tore down the plains and slammed into the first wave of corpses as they shambled into the waters, detonating the line of rotting bodies with electric blue flames.  Explosions rippled through the sea of skin. 

Ruiz’s spirit, who if she was anything like her warlock counterpart would be stocky and brusque and covered with tattoos of women in various lewd positions, shielded Shiv and the others on the shore from the greasy organic fallout.  Chunks of skin rained down and spattered into the waters, a gory hail of organs, blood and limbs.  The air reeked of decayed innards. 

Shiv moved forward.  Ruiz’s spirit hardened the air into a second shield, a solid belt of telekinetic force stretched across the blood-thickened water like a bridge.  Zombies writhed and fell apart beneath Jahl and Cask’s pyrokinetic onslaught, and those that didn’t were mowed down by close-range gunfire and soiled blades.  Shiv kept her face shielded as her soldiers hacked through the wall of collapsing flesh. 

They moved across the bridge.  The masses of undead were slow but deliberate, and only a few dozen had been wiped out by Jahl’s blast.  Already more corpses piled forward from the ruins of Wolftown, their bodies oozing guts and blood.  Hisses of dead breath steamed the chill morning air in a dissonant chorus of once-human growls.  Faces and bodies and decaying teeth pressed round them in walls of grey skin.  

Clouds of stench and vapor swept over them.  Shiv took a deep breath, held it, felt power boil inside her.  The only known living Kindred, Shiv had the ability to channel other people’s spirits or the souls of the lost and awaken them to their true potential.  Her power subtly allowed Jahl and Ruiz to maintain their magical effects without overextending themselves, and neither warlock was forced to use the level of energy normally needed.  Now her eyes shone blue-white, a spectral glaze which allowed her to view the forlorn ghosts of all of the people who’d died in the forsaken valley.  Many more than the residents of Wolftown had perished there – entire ships filled with human prisoners had come, loads of frightened chattel deposited into the bowl of smoking earth where they were summarily executed by exposure to the Ebon Kingdoms’ necrotic gases.  She felt their death rattles, heard their cries. Their final moments re-lived, a throng of terror, anger and sadness. 

The bodies shifted forward through dripping walls of steam and acid fog.  Shiv watched their glowing faces, saw the dissipating spirits roam molten.  She let the anger burn through her.  Cold lanced down her arms and icy bile built in her chest.  Voices echoed around her, the whispers of the lost, slicing across her skin like a gelid blade. 

A measure of ruthlessness was necessary when manipulating the dead.  Once, when she was younger, she’d felt pity for them, and a sense of guilt had always settled when she’d been forced to manipulate those energies.  She’d grown up hard: most of those emotions had boiled away. 

Shiv snapped her hands forward.  Pain cracked through her fingers.  A sheet of power peeled away, razor sharp.  Ghastly steam purged from her stomach and out of her mouth, burning drool she nearly vomited up as explosive vapors swirled forth.

Spirits screamed through the air – the ghosts of the lost, the abandoned and forlorn souls of all those slaughtered in the valley, returned to roost in the decaying corpses that used to be their homes.  Phantoms made weapons, apparitions who poured across the landscape in a wave of frozen flames.  They rent their own human shells to pieces.  Shiv felt some semblance of recognition among the spirits, fleeting recollection of what they’d been, what had happened to them. 

Meat and gristle and sickly green blood exploded across the ground.  Nauseating stench spilled along with bucketfuls of greasy black innards and stale gore.  Ruiz’s shield blocked tidal explosions of human filth. 

Shiv marched through it all, protected by the spirits she’d summoned, vagrant wraiths dominated by her will.  Unlike Ebon Kingdoms soul magic the spirits came willingly, and she didn’t shape them so much as used what they offered.  They were a horde of the vanquished. 

Not a single zombie was left standing.  The shore was awash with grey skin and black blood, oozing cadavers and steaming pools of boiling human slime.  The smell was overpowering, but Shiv had smelled worse.

The ruins of Wolftown were a shell.  Long abandoned corrugated tin shelters and crumbling adobe walls still smoked from when Fane had burned the settlement out.  Skeletal remains were piled against the few standing structures, small round buildings reinforced with concertina and sandbags and topped with the remains of weapon turrets and lookout towers.  The interior of Wolftown was desolate, a smoking field of burned waste and piles of long scorched debris.  Danica had told Shiv about this place, a hunter’s refuge that had been sacked years ago. 

Ruiz, Gyver and Moone were right with her, their weapons drawn and eyes alert as they watched for any signs of other undead.  Shiv’s boots fell on drifts of ash and bone.  The soiled remains of ruined corpses came up to her ankles, and her pale cloak was soon covered with dismal remains.  She adjusted her leather armor, rubbed her hands together for warmth and checked the blades at her belt. 

There was nothing to fear there except for the man they’d come to find.  She heard him huddled in one of the few remaining structures in Wolftown, breathing lightly in the hopes that he wouldn’t be discovered.  His spirit pulsed weakly from behind the cracked walls, a dim murmur cowed by the presence of so many forlorn ghosts – they were an anathema to arcane spirits, hunter fish in the sea of dead.  The man himself wasn’t much stronger, and as Shiv turned the corner and looked into the hollow shell of the building she saw him crouching, his eyes wide with fright, his hair disheveled and his once clean armor all but rotting away from his skin.  His gauntlets were stained with rust and blood and he looked at her for a moment like he wasn’t sure if she was real, like she was another one of the apparitions he’d been avoiding for days while still laying enough enchantments down to avoid detection by the zombies.

“
You’re smart, Quinn,” Shiv said.  “You knew this was an abandoned outpost, and that nothing but zombies had been left here, without so much as a supervising revenant.  You also knew no one from Fane or Meldoar or the resistance would come looking for you in this place.”  Shiv cocked her head sideways, and smiled.  “Except me.”

“
You bitch,” Quinn growled.  His inhuman eyes flashed, one of the many parts of his body that had been replaced with vampire technology.  His lanky brown hair shifted in the wind, and he moved heel to haunch like some sort of animal.  She heard stone crunch in his grip – the gauntlets weren’t just gauntlets but metal appendages, bio-organic limbs powered by steam and magic.  Their cold blue metallic glint reminded Shiv of Danica’s bloodsteel appendage.  “Luck may have led you to me,” he said, “but it won’t save you.”

Shiv felt Ruiz and Gyver move up to flank her, but she ushered them back – Quinn was more than a match for either of them, but it was too late.  Quinn lurched forward, and Shiv felt his spirit stain the air.  That ghost was twisted, broken, a shell of what she’d been – even before she’d been forced to protect her warlock from being detected for days without rest he’d already worn the very fabric of her being thin by subjecting her to cruel experimental manipulations at the hands of the Ebon Kingdoms.  Quinn had willingly sold his body to the vampires so he could be augmented, made “more than human” in exchange for vital information they’d use to crush the resistance. 

Cold scaled against Shiv’s skin, and it was all Ruiz could do to raise his own spirit in time to shield her.  Soiled soul energy lashed against them in tendrils of ice and grease.  His spirit’s whispers sliced through her mind like insane chattering.  Shiv saw her, and the image of that emaciated and burned out soul was saddening.  Once she’d been powerful, but now she was little more than another pestilent ghost.

Ruiz shouted out in pain.  Quinn’s thaumaturgic augmentations made his spirit powerful, and even with Shiv’s aid the warlock’s shields wouldn’t hold for very long.  The air was bitter cold and tasted rancid, and hard driving wind pushed away from the crazed warlock like a sour gale.  Shiv felt death in the air.  Soul magic had been used to craft Quinn’s metal arms, and the effect those soul-bending enchantments had on his spirit rendered her entirely monstrous, no longer a creature of feeling or thought but a roaming ghast of hatred and remorse, a bitter and empty being whose sole purpose was to punish the living for being what she wasn’t. 

Shiv found the spirit’s core, the dripping tendrils of ectoplasm and spectral veins that dangled like ganglia.  They were caustic and slick, difficult to grab without doing some harm to one or the other, but Shiv concentrated, pushed Ruiz’s spirit to its limits (she hated doing that without warning him, for the strain was incredible, and she felt his pain and fear as his body rippled with hurt, but she had no choice) and cleaved her mind to the unstable dimensions of Quinn’s tortured ghost.  The Ebon Kingdom’s technology made the effort difficult, for both spirits sparked and folded against her like sheets of bladed iron.  Pain lanced down her chest and nausea welled in her stomach.

Grabbing hold of another’s spirit and manipulating it against their host’s will was a violation, a forceful entry.  Shiv held it akin to rape, and hated herself for doing it, hated that it was one of her most powerful abilities. 

She screamed, and tightened her grip on Quinn’s spirit.  His biomechanical enhancements made it difficult to grab her cleanly, to achieve any sort of true cohesion that didn’t involve crushing her, or him.  The necrotic conduits fought back, charged the air with defensive currents.  Blood seeped from Shiv’s nose, but she fought through the pain and dizziness and breathed deep, took hold of that energy and convinced herself it didn’t matter if she hurt the spirit or not. 

Quinn’s eyes bulged as he realized what was happening.  His spirit cleaved to his soul, bound there by unnatural bio-genetic wiring.  She turned against him, grew suddenly unstable as weylines of arcane energies burned back through the air like streams of fuel put to the flame, and the very safeguards and twisted thaumaturgy that had made it so he could manipulate and twist his spirit were the very thing that prevented him from being able to pull away.  She was bonded to him, a companion made his prisoner, a soul mate made his slave. 

Shiv burned those energies and scorched the spirit’s being until she was nothing more than a mindless shred of what she’d been.  Quinn had no escape.  His screams echoed through the burned structure.  The warlock’s skin blistered black and peeled away from his bones, exposing oozing hot muscle and scorched blood. 

Within moments Quinn was quiet, and he lay there on the ground, a grotesque and smoking shell.  His skin was charred, and his leather armor was fused to what was left of his body.  His hair had burned away, his eyes popped, and his corpse was surrounded by a grim haze of vile smoke.