Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (23 page)

“
Wake up, Shiv.”

Daylight.  She was outside again.  The earth was cold and grey and shone beneath the bitter rays of a low winter sun.  Clouds knifed across the sky, and frozen wind chapped her lips.
             

She was dressed in soiled grey clothing that clung to her skin with dirt and sweat.  Her fingers and toes were black and freezing.  She felt voices all around her, harsh and edged. 

“You have to understand, the White Children were dying,” Mace said.  “The resistance had failed.  There was nothing left, no other way.”

He stood at her back.  He was a tall man, broad of shoulder, and his shadow fell over her so she seemed to stand in a black pool.  The glacial plains stretched on forever, and in the distance she heard the crash of the sea.

“You betrayed us,” she said. 

“
No, no, Shiv,” he said, and she felt him move up closer behind her.  “I saved us.  Yes, a few had to die, but no movement can succeed without making sacrifices.”  She heard sorrow in his voice, and a hint of madness.

Everything was hazy.  She felt pain, but it was distant, like it belonged to somebody else.  She was cold and filled with fear, but none of what was happening even seemed to panic her.  She stood outside herself, a spectator to her own fate. 

Shiv stood on a shelf of rock hedged in by snow-covered granite, a bridge leading to a field of pale and smoking ice.  Everything was blackened with age and damp with grease, and dark water seeped up through cracks in the stone.  Her feet were damp.  She shivered, but didn’t feel it.

There were bodies in the field, rows of them.  Limbs darkened by frostbite and rot gave them the semblance of something burned.  There were two dozen, maybe more, stretched out and staked on crosses that had been driven like old nails into the face of the ice.  They were long dead – she heard the frail whispers of their spirits there in the gelid air, a collective hiss of cracked voices like the last breath of a dying giant.

A quarter moon rose to the east.  The stars were bright and distinct, and Shiv almost felt she could reach out and touch them.

“
What have you done?” she asked, because she knew without having to see them up close that those bodies belonged to the White Children, both those who’d been part of the convoy and others who’d died before. 

“
We were on the losing side,” Mace said.  “I changed that.”             

“
You sold us out to the vampires,” she said.  Something held her in place.  She heard the fatigue in her own voice, the pain.  She was on the verge of death.

“
I’d never do that, Shiv,” he said.  “I hate the vampires as much as you,
more
than you.  They drove me to this.”

“
Who, then?” she asked, and one of the cloaked figures stepped around, its shadow looming over her.

Grey and rotting skin was pulled taut against its oversized bones, a tall and gangly undead creature standing some nine-feet tall.  Dead black eyes stared down on her, and its preposterously tall head looked like it had been somehow compressed, squeezed in by a vise so its chattering teeth were as long as blunted daggers.  The creature wore armor beneath its cloak and gripped one of her arms in gangly and elongated fingers capped with black talons.  The Scarecrow took hold of both of her hands and chained them together before it started leading her onto the field. 

“The Kindred is special,” Mace called out as she was led onto the ice.  “You’ll be the weapon New Koth needs to strike down the Ebon Kingdoms once and for all!”

Her bare feet pushed through icy dust.  Cold lanced up her legs and chilled her core, a frozen grip around her stomach and heart.  Pain seared through her then, hours of agony, and she heard the screams, the calls of the other White Children as they were slowly crucified over a field of black ice.

A cold presence waited below, a dark and shimmering shape swimming beneath the surface.  It followed them as they walked, pressed up against the frozen lake where it slithered along like an ebon shark.  She felt its darkness push up at her. 

Shiv’s tears rolled cold down her cheeks.  She knew that creature on the other side of the ice, knew its hunger and its rage.  She’d faced it’s kind before, had even killed its brethren.

The Maloj was waiting for her. 

TWELVE

WATERS

Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

Danica dreamed of rain.

She knew it wasn’t real – she’d never known rain, and never would – but that didn’t stop her from running through the downpour.  She couldn’t tell where she was, but it didn’t really matter.  There was sky, and rain, and every drop felt like an angel’s kiss on her skin.  She was whole again, her flesh restored, her scars washed away by the storm.  She felt blood pulse through her arm.  Water slicked her thick red hair and pasted it against her face.

Eric was there, smiling, young, his hands held open to the sky.  They danced, two people lost in the rain, hoping never to be found. 

When she woke it was to the rattle of the train.  For a moment she thought she was back on the Dubrakki Railway, escaping from Shadowmere Keep and now on her way to Blacksand.  Kane was still alive, and she was still whole. 

The memory faded, and reality settled in.  With it came a sense of loss so heavy it weighted her breaths. 

“You okay, chief?” Alvarez asked.  His stubbly face was barely visible in the half-light coming through the window.  The train rumbled along, bound north out of Meldoar towards the edge of the Seraph Wastes, a stretch of scorched earth which surrounded the ruined city.  The Gol hadn’t built many railways – it wasn’t practical, really, as the tracks were expensive and dangerous to lay and maintain, and the amount of raw thaumaturgy required to construct them was enormous – but in this case it was the safest way to get to the coast, which teemed with the remnants of military outposts, devastated settlements and downed aircraft.  The area had become a vital point where the Gol could collect salvage. 

“
Not really,” she said.  She sat up and nearly banged her head against the wall as the train rattled violently.  Danica steadied herself, and smiled grimly.  “I was having a nice dream.”

“
I trust I was in it,” Alvarez smiled.  He was a good-looking man, not remotely Hispanic at all in spite of his name.  As the details of the inside of the rail car became clear Danica looked past him and saw Delgado standing watch near the opposite wall, and just through the panels she saw the soiled countryside, a region ruined by war.  It was a night-drenched waste of twisted grey trees, toxic marshes and silver mist.  The sky was thick and black beyond the runic pyres which lit the frozen bog; sparks of spectral flame bounced off the waters. 

“
You?” she said to Alvarez.  “Not a chance in hell.”

She looked at the airship, stored there inside the train car.  It was an ugly thing, squat and jagged, its armor plating and edged hull giving it the semblance of an undead shark.  Massive chain guns and detonation charges lined the underside of the vessel, and the ochre-colored beast was dented and scarred and missing chunks of armor plate.  The vehicle barely fit within the walls, and every time the locomotive shuddered as it barreled down the tracks the airship rattled like a caged beast trying to escape.  Maur and Raine were both inside; the Gol was visible in the cockpit, and the female mercenary was near the cargo door checking weapons.

“Did you check them already?” Danica asked, and the dark-haired woman shot her a smirk. 

“
Maybe,” she said.  “It keeps me from getting antsy.”

Danica nodded – she could identify with that.  They’d been on the train for hours, searching for their contact.  Communications with the refugees from the remains of Ath were spotty even at the best of times, and with Ebon Kingdom’s interference it was a wonder they were able to communicate with the band at all. 

The train roared along, as loud as a dying metal animal, but thankfully vampire patrols in the area were slim since most of the Suckhead’s attention was focused on destroying the much larger and immediate threat of Wulf; while there was little doubt the Grim Father would eventually set his sights on the Gol, intelligence gathered seemed to indicate the vampires were hoping Meldoar and the East Claw Coalition would soften each other up before the Ebon Kingdoms mounted a full-scale offensive. 

I’ll take care of Wulf for you,
Danica thought bitterly. 
I’ll kill that bastard if it’s the last thing I do
.

She looked back out through the gaps in the wall and watched the marshy wastes.  To the north lie Rimefang Loch, once a roiling and active sea, now a dismal ocean filled with blood and debris.  Before the Ebon Kingdoms had won the war the center of the Loch had been the focal point of the conflict, the watery rubicon which both sides warred over day and night, even when the rest of the continent seemed at rest.  She’d been out on those waters herself, searching for the Witch’s Eye at Azradayne’s behest, sent to open the door which allowed the Maloj slip into the world without even understanding what it was she was doing.  Part of her took the blame for everything that had happened – it was the Maloj who’d changed the tide of the war, after all, and she’d let them come through – but she knew fault for that incursion lay on the spider’s shoulders.

You’ll pay, as well.  Take a number.  I’ll get to you.

Danica had been killed and reborn several times now in her life, but nothing had been as traumatizing as her return from the clutches of Lynch and the vampires of Lorn.  Lady Riven had changed her into a beast, a traitor with an artifact blade sent to do her bidding. 

I’d almost been lost for good, then
, she thought, and she thought of Eric, who’d never given up on her, and Ronan, who’d nearly sacrificed himself to help bring her back. 
Gone now.  All gone.

“
Look,” Alvarez said, snapping Danica from her thoughts. 

The inside of the train was as cold as a freezer, as the bone-chilling breeze from outside pushed right through the gaps in the walls and latched onto their skin like raw fingers.  Alvarez knelt down and stared at one of the larger holes next to the left-hand doors; Danica knelt next to him, unable to hear much of anything over the rattling metal and wood.  The earthy stench of the bog crept in at them, easily overpowering the stale odor of old hay and animal dung they’d been stuck with for hours. 

The blonde-man positioned his face next to Danica’s and pointed straight out.  The dark of night and drifts of silver smoke made it difficult to see anything more than a few hundred yards away, but every now and again the fumes parted and the moon shone bright enough for them to see the distant glacial waters.  After a moment Danica caught a glimpse of what he was pointing at – a large silhouette at the edge of the marsh, quietly walking back and forth with a massive pole in hand. 

“
He’s there,” she said.  “Switch to comms.  Maur, run a radius sweep, focus on undead first, then do a second sweep for life forms.”  The thaumaturgic radar clicked to life, and Danica waited for Maur to give his usual lecture about how one could not simply sweep for undead, that you had to use a standard proximity sweep with a broad spectrum and watch for gaps in the data, holes in the reading that would indicate something was there even though it appeared not to be.  He didn’t, and Danica was grateful: she could only put up with so much Gol strangeness in one day.

They waited, tensed, and readied their weapons.  Danica had a G36C, her preferred weapon for years and one she managed to keep getting her hands on; Alvarez and Raine both had M-16s, while Delgado had a Remington 870 and an AK-47, which he alternated between depending on their distance from their intended target. 

Danica glanced through the cockpit window and caught sight of Maur staring into the nautascope.  His sickly grey face was always wrapped tight with red cloth and hidden under his hood, and what skin was visible was lit bright green by the arcane instruments; his eyes seemed more yellow than normal, shining like gilded moons.

“
Doj,” he said over the comm-mikes.  “No undead.”

“
Let’s go,” she said. 

They assembled on the airship.  Maur powered up the vehicle, which shuddered to life.  Lights flashed all along the curved and jagged red metal interior, and soon the silenced turbine engines lifted the vessel up from the floor of the train car and out of the camouflaged roof, a series of mesh webs covered with tarps painted to look like the rest of the crumbling wood.  It took some excellent timing and piloting skills on Maur’s part to take off without bumping into the walls, especially given the momentum of the train, but after a few seconds they were out and flying close to the swampy earth, blasting marsh waters in their wake. 

The inside of the vessel was dark save for necessary instrumentation lighting.  Danica held tight to the overhead bar.  Her black and purple armor hugged tight against her body, and her metal arm held firm to the steel, not crushing it only by her sheer force of will.  She felt her spirit stir within the arm, agitated, anxious.  They’d been through so much together, had been to hell and back.  She’d heard his voice ever since she was a girl, but she could never understand him.  She wondered what he thought of their current situation, and as if in response a chill ran up her spine and sent a knot of tension through her back.  Her muscles were tight, her eyes gummed over with fatigue.  They’d been awake for over twenty-four hours searching for their Doj contact, and it would be many more before they could rest.