Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (42 page)

It was difficult to rise.  Her legs were like wet sticks, barely capable of supporting her weight.  Mist purled under her chin. 

“Where am I?” she asked the darkness, not really expecting an answer, and while none came she realized she already knew.  Understanding dawned on her, elusive before but for some reason now as plain as day.

She was there to seal the Breach.  She’d always known the power flowing through her veins had been granted for a purpose. 

She’d been chosen.

Shiv emerged from the room and stepped into a wide corridor of red rock and sloped shelves.  It took her eyes a moment to adjust as she moved down the hall, for the air was thick with smoke and dust.  Sounds slowly filtered in, gunfire, rumbling, the hiss of undead.  Bodies lay outside the door, men who looked like they’d been watching over the entrance to her chambers, but they’d been gutted and left to bleed out.

A war was taking place all around her.  She didn’t have much time. 

Fear hung over her like a shroud, yet Shiv found her thoughts oddly disconnected and calm.  Her father had raised her to be the best person she could, and Creasy had died so she could do what needed to be done.  She was the last Kindred, the sole inheritor of the White Mother’s power. 
She
was the force to be feared, not the Ebon Kingdoms, not the Maloj, not the Coalition or New Koth or the spider.  She, Shiv, was something to be terrified of.  She was the key, even if something had kept her from realizing that until now.

She pressed down the corridor and emerged into a war-torn city.  She saw towers of red crystal and spires of crimson rock under siege from seemingly every direction.  Explosions of dust and smoke riddled the false sky.  High above was a cavern ceiling pocked with cave mouths.  Vampires and undead streamed through those openings, crawling like insects along the jagged stone face. 

Shiv found herself at the end of a long lane of blank stone buildings.  Bodies lay on the ground, torn apart by bullets, blades and claws.  A few undead husks lay there, as well, smoking in the cold and smelling of funeral pyres and rot.  A dark hole had been rent in a nearby wall, forced from the other side. 

Spirits surrounded her.  She’d never felt so many, from distant places she’d never even heard of, other times, other realities.  She sensed ghosts of worlds destroyed, worlds to be, of people who hadn’t even been killed yet: future souls, suffering the loss of hosts whose lives might not even come to an end.  The touch of metal slithered against her skin and shadows lapped around her fingers and toes.

Greyness merged with darkness.  She felt her mind everywhere, her presence and consciousness stretched like a constellation of stars.  The air burned blue.  Everything was different, more complete: the edges different, the margins, the shadows and cracks in the walls.  She
saw.

Shiv noted the presence of her friends, friends dead, but not dead.  She sensed the gulf beneath them, the impossible rip that yearned to be opened, but that for the sake of everyone needed to be sealed. 

Heart swimming with power and eyes cast blue with ancient magic, Shiv went to meet her fate.  It was time to close the Breach.

TWENTY-THREE

ALIVE

Ronan felt hollow inside.  He’d regretted it every day since he’d left her there outside that Bonespire.  Why had he left? 

Maybe I was afraid
, he told himself. 
Afraid of what she was doing to me. 
But that wasn’t it.  After Cross and Danica had died it had been just been the two of them, alone in the world.  He’d cared for her, protected her with a passion he’d never before known.  The sense of duty and responsibility he’d only ever felt for his teammates had been transferred to this strange, awkward girl, blue of skin and dark of eyes, so transformed from the child he’d met back at Rimefang Loch she was no longer the same person.

We’re both changed, you and I.  This is what the world does to you.  It twists you, molds you into what you need to be.

He remembered that first night, when they’d realized they were alone, hiding under an old oak at the edge of a rock bluff near The Reach.  In the years to follow they’d make contact with others, would learn of the White Children and their desire to follow the power Shiv held inside her.  But for those first few weeks it was just them.

Ronan had never cared for another as he’d cared for her.  He’d been raised and bred to kill, to take life – it made no sense to worry about its value, to form bonds.  They were strictly forbidden from using names there in the barracks, he and the other boys, because they weren’t human – they were killers trapped in young men’s bodies, beaten and bled and forced to run miles barefoot on hot desert sand and dumped into Bloodcat breeding ground with nothing more than a hip-knife. 

He remembered back to the steps which led to where he was supposed to kill the blonde boy, recalled a swell of fear when he’d realized what he was, and how badly he wanted to be more.

Sometimes in his mind he imagined them together, he and Shiv, with no White Children and no war.  Sometimes they ventured across the wastes, living off the land and avoiding danger.  Sometimes they had a cabin or a bunker, and she’d learn to use her powers while he taught her how to survive, just like those first few weeks.  Something about Shiv had kept him alive, even after all of those years of being apart.

He’d wanted so badly to take her somewhere, anywhere, but there was nowhere she’d be safe.  He couldn’t save her, not even from herself, and when she’d insinuated that she’d wanted to die and that only
he
  could help her, he knew he had to leave. 

“
It’s not your choice,” he’d said.  She’d never forgiven him, and he’d never forgiven himself.

The greatest regret of his soiled life was that he’d never been able to tell Shiv how he felt, to show her how much she meant to him.  He’d held more love for her than he ever had for anybody, even more than for Danica, or the team.  But all of that love had meant nothing because he couldn’t help her when she’d needed him the most.

Now, at last, he could make things right.

Red fog surrounded them, a haze of boiling blood.  Ronan’s vision kept fading in and out.

“
This is impossible,” Warfield said.  “You were dead.”

She was fawning over Cross again, just like she always had, and just like she always would, even with the end of the world looming over their heads.

It all made perfect sense to Ronan.  He’d traveled these strange roads before, back when the team had pursued Cross across the wastelands and found themselves in a devastated future Thornn that had been destroyed, and then at a Shadowmere Keep where Cross had been taken back in time and held hostage for years.  Maybe that sort of thing should have bothered him, but it didn’t.  Not anymore. 

We don’t have much time left, too little to worry about things that don’t matter.

“Where’s Shiv?” he asked.

“
There,” Cross said.  “She woke up.”

“
And why the fuck wasn’t someone watching her?” Ronan growled.  He couldn’t think too hard on how it was that Cross and Danica could be there in Bloodhollow and not dead. 

Battle raged all around them.  Ronan, Cross, Warfield, the hex technician Felix and the blonde man they called Lucan Keth raced across Bloodhollow.  A barrage of gunfire sounded near the distant bridges, and even from halfway across the city Ronan smelled the stain of colliding spirits and explosive magic.  His head was pounding.  Armed men and women who looked like they’d just crawled out of the wastes raced up and down the streets, pausing only long enough to shoot at roving Coalition gargoyles or Ebon Kingdom’s undead descending from above, winged zombies and revenants and vampires throwing themselves from the distant ceiling, a cavalcade of bodies, some of which survived their falls by breaking roofs or crushing people beneath them. 

Ronan and Cross hewed through undead as they rounded a corner. 

“
Someone was watching her,” Lucan said.  “They were killed.”

“
One of you should have been with her...” Ronan said.

A kaithoren appeared from out of nowhere, bloated and oozing puss and blood.  Razored tentacles lashed out and snapped into a nearby building, sending chunks of rock hailing down.  A blast of putrid air washed over them, the soiled stench of the creature’s presence.  Ronan stepped into the arc of a tentacle as it snapped down and nearly took his head off, then swiped up with his katana and sawed away three limbs at once.  Writhing appendages fell to the ground amidst jets of squirting green fluid.  The creature’s beaked maw hissed at him, but Warfield sent a wave of bladed ice through its flank, crippling the creature’s bulbous body long enough for Cross to sink his double-blade into its core and bring the monster down in a sickening splash. 

Ronan felt dizzy.  He glanced down and saw that the creature hadn’t been so slow after all, as a sizable gash was in his side, oozing brackish blood.

“
A little help here.”

Warfield’s spirit wrapped around him, scalding his skin as it sealed the wound.  He closed his eyes, trying to keep the Deadlands at bay.  He felt it pulling him in.

Not yet. 
It had been so hard to return the last few times he’d entered.  He had to make his next trip count, because there was no guarantee he’d be coming back.  Shadows crept into his thoughts and hardened his insides like blood freezing in his veins. 

“
Where is she?” he said.  “Where’s Shiv?”

“
And Danica?” Cross asked.  “Is she still at the bridge?”

“
Yes,” Lucan said.  “And she’s in trouble.”

“
Shit,” Warfield said.  “We can’t be everywhere at once.”             

“
I’m going after Shiv,” Ronan said.  “You all can do what you want.”  He looked at Lucan.  “Where is she?”

“
This only works if everyone makes it,” Lucan said.  “Shiv, myself and the blades all have to be present in the temple over the Breach, alive and intact.”  He looked at Warfield and Felix.  “That equipment you have can help make sure we’re pinpointing the correct spot and get the job done properly.” 

Felix looked at the pack he was toting – radio gear, a spectrometer, some barometric gauges, an arcane flux analyzer and a good old-fashioned eye-ball in a glass sphere – and then at Lucan.

“It will?” he asked.

“
Yes,” Lucan said.  “So you two get to the temple and make yourselves useful.  Start analyzing weylines and look for the strongest flux point.”  He looked at Cross.  “Get Danica, bring her back here.  I’ll help Ronan.”

Gargoyles and vampires and winged undead fliers bore down on them from out of the sky.  Ronan and Lucan stepped through the lees of bomb-shaken structures, crippled red domes and crimson towers falling apart at the seams.  They coughed in the dust of decades-old bricks.

Gunfire raged around them.  Explosive bursts pocketed above, staccato blasts which rippled across the subterranean sky like stains in water.  Ronan smelled death in the wind, and he sensed thaumaturgic pressure ooze from every pore of the man next to him.  It was a familiar power, the power of the blades, only less diluted, raw.  A burning presence.

They slashed through shadows and raced around the remains of broken buildings.  Lucan led, moving with determination, his cold eyes glowing like iced diamonds.  Neither of them spoke – there was no need.  They might have had different reasons for needing to get to Shiv, but they shared that purpose, and they would both kill or die to see it done.

The skyline was a haze of red shadow and black dust.  There was no source for the light sinking down from the heights of the cavern, no crystals or flames, but it was getting more difficult to see with each passing moment as thick clouds of gun and firesmoke streamed up from the damaged city.  Ronan wasn’t sure how many men Lucan had, but there was no way they could keep this up. 

They kept to the shadows and watched battles at the edge of the city.  Coalition Troj knifed their way through flesh golems and massive Ebon Kingdom’s zombies.  Gun battles echoed up and down the streets between men and undead.  Coalition forces engaged Ebon Kingdom regulars in bloody melees that left bodies splattered across the walls.

“
There,” Lucan said.  “I see her.”

Shiv was flying – more accurately, she was floating, held aloft by some phantom wind which kept her elevated above the carnage.  The cavalcade of spirits surrounded her like a bladed fog.  Vampires shot at her and missed, as their bone needles and hexed rounds dissolved against the swirling mass of energies around her.  Gargoyles drew close and burned away, their flesh melted by the pulsing shield.  She was pale and quiet, her arms to her side, her dark hair blowing in the dank wind.  Ronan saw her eyes, pale and shining, pinpricks of starlight in the gloom.

More shapes in the underworld air, hanged men converging on her.  Dark cloaks fluttered in their own necrotic breeze, decayed hands held open, crackling white energy bursting off burn-black flesh.