Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (45 page)

“We’re okay,” he whispered.  “We’re okay.”

She held him close, wanting to believe him.

Motion at the edge of the courtyard caught her eye.

Shiv held Lucan in her arms.  He was breathing, but only barely.  His chest heaved, and with each motion more blood leaked from his wounds; every breath he drew was a death rattle, rasping and heavy and gurgling.  The glowing girl tried to heal him, but for some reason it wasn’t working.

“We have....to hurry...” he rasped.  “Before...I’m no longer here...”

“
Everything is ready,” Warfield said.  “Felix has the calculations made.  If we’re going to do it, we need to do it now.”             

Danica looked down at Kane’s body. 

I’m sorry
, she thought.  She looked at Cross and Ronan, and they watched her in kind.  They all understood what needed to be done, so without hesitation they followed Shiv and Lucan into the temple.

The loss of their friends would not be in vain.

TWENTY-FIVE

HEROES

The inside of the temple was planed smooth, red walls covered with a thin crystal coating of dust and frost.  The ceiling seemed higher than before, and it took Cross a moment to realize that was because it
was
higher – the dome extended further than should have been physically possible, a swirling vortex of shadow, one side of a massive hole.  Strangely, it didn’t look deep at all but flat, like staring at a static screen of darkness.

The Breach.  Once below their feet, now over their heads, the plane of portal shifting as reality started to unravel.  It was weakening.

He, Danica and Ronan came in with Shiv.  Her cloak was tattered at the knees and elbows and her frosted skin appeared matted with mineral oil and ice.  The palms of her hands were dark with blood, not dripping and fresh but old and crusted like it had been there for ages. 

They were all exhausted, covered with wounds, stumbling in the near dark. 

We’re almost there.  Almost there.

Cross had lost all sense of time’s passage.  He no longer knew if it was day or night, or if that even mattered.  His eyes burned with fatigue, and every muscle ached.  Fresh cuts on his face and arms burned in the cold and oozed puss.

The vision of the vortex seemed tattooed on the stone.  Cross watched as Warfield and Felix went to a thaumaturgic sensor they’d set up on the floor, gauges and wires connected to nodes hooked to the walls.  He’d seen such devices before, and knew that they were normally used to determine the potential arcane stability in order to gauge if it was safe to use magic in an area.  Lucan had implied they could use that same equipment to determine the exact point they should target in the Breach in order to seal it forever. 

It was strange seeing Warfield there.  He’d lusted after her for years, but he’d decided even before leaving Thornn that she wasn’t for him.  She was still lovely, slightly older and hair cut pixie-short, and the runic tattoos on her neck and arms were plainly visible now that she’d removed her cloak and worked in a tank-top and dark cargo pants.  He hadn’t thought about her in a long time, and even now all he needed was to glance at Danica – bloody, dirty, also down to her armor jacket, her red hair long and flowing down her back, her golem arm moving with metallic menace – to forget the other witch altogether.

Still, her being here has helped.  It’s a good thing she had that equipment with her.

Felix nervously prattled on about how they needed to be careful, how they could do serious damage, but Warfield calmly told him to chill out and carry on.  

Lucan was dying.  Danica and Shiv knelt close to him, doing their best to staunch the flow of his strange dark blood while Ronan stood guard near the door.  Cross looked on, his throat tight with fear. 

“
The ammo they hit him with was specially prepared,” Shiv said.  The spirits swirled around her, a visible cloak of roving shadows and angry vapors, ethereal things given shape and form.  “Reaver was given rounds attenuated to the Soulweaver’s life patterns.  If it would have hit me, the effect would be the same.”

Cross put his hand on Danica’s shoulder, and she squeezed it. 

“How close are we?” he called to Warfield.

“
Close,” she answered curtly.  “Felix is working on it.  Just hang on.”

He stared up, and that old fear returned, stronger than before.  The darkness overhead glittered with false stars and dark constellations, cold light the color of pure ice.  Shadows roved there, vague outlines of charred bones and eyes from the pits of hell: staring down, watching, waiting.  Cross looked away, feeling weightless and sick.  Ice ran through his veins.

“Easy,” Danica said, and she stood up and held him.  “Easy.”

His heart ached at her strength.  They gripped hands, and Cross realized he could no longer imagine his life without her in it.  He would protect her, always. 

Cross imagined a future where he and Danica lived on a croft in some distant corner of the world.  Shiv was there, and she and Danica loved each other like sisters, and together they’d all teach each other how to survive and live and love, they’d plant and hunt and keep camels for riding across the wastes of the healing world.  And Ronan would be there, Shiv’s protector, their loyal friend.

We can be more.

Cross breathed hard, and felt tears in his eyes.  Bit by bit he tore the dream from his mind.  It was a childish fantasy, and he was a fool to imagine it.  All that mattered now was the Breach, and sealing it forever.

A scream rang out, male and high-pitched.

It’s a good thing she had that equipment with her.

They flinched as the cry ripped through the freezing air.  The noise fell from above like rain.

How did she know to bring that equipment?

Soulrazor/Avenger was cold in his grip as he pulled it from it’s sheath.  He didn’t remember reaching for it, wasn’t even sure what was happening. 

Cross’s skin crawled.  He heard claws against stone, smelled the stench of burning things.  Every instinct inside him told him this was wrong, that he wasn’t supposed to be there.  He glanced up, and found himself looking into the heart of oblivion. 

The portal above widened.  Shadows bled through the rip, so cold they fell like oil.  There were no words within Cross to understand this black eternity which stretched out overhead, the thinness of the layer, the sheer mass of what pushed from the other side.

The floor of the room steamed like the surface of a frozen lake, and the air above split like a dark and smoky jewel.  Slabs of jagged midnight fractured from the other side of the barrier like the shifting of some great weight.  Everything shuddered.

From the corner of his eye he saw Shiv stand and stare while Lucan struggled to stay alive.  Danica and Ronan both had blades drawn and held ready.

It’s a good thing she had that equipment with her.

Across the room, Felix was dying.  Something had cut his throat, and his blood fell in slowed time as he choked and tumbled to the floor. 

The Breach was growing.  Shapes shifted and undulated like something melting beneath the sun.  Black fire burned cold.  He saw wolfen aspects, dark with hunger, their souls as black as night.

How did she know to bring that equipment?

He heard another voice then, a voice from his nightmares. 

You are here by my design.  And I will take you.

Fear iced through his heart.  Cross felt sluggish, moving as if trapped in a dream.  Slowly he turned and looked at Warfield in the half-lit darkness.  She smiled and nodded.  Fire erupted from her hands.  The light blazed her shadow against the wall, unstable and dark, flickering in and out like a memory.  He looked into her cold, cold eyes and saw the same white as from the snowy field, the white from the tavern in Dirge, the malign presence of the Whisperlands, the creature that had guided his path for years, maybe his whole life.

Warfield was the spider: Azradayne. 

She’d brought them together, all of the pieces she needed, the blades and the last of the Soulweavers, assembled them where she could use the power they held to do what she couldn’t do herself, to finish opening the Breach.  Centuries of hate curled in her pale gaze.  In a glimpse she showed him her cursed birth, a creature born of chaotic energies, a child of the destruction wrought upon the worlds by The Black.  Not truly an ally of the Maloj, she saw them as a tool to be used for her own ends: the destruction of all living things.  Her revenge for being born, the unmaking of reality.

Shiv moved between them and bent the flames away.  It visibly pained her to reflect Azradayne’s attack, but the Kindred gritted her teeth and stepped forward, her eyes shining with cobalt light.  He could see her changing.  Midnight energies rippled across her skin and turned it bluer, almost silver.  Her jaw was hard set and her chin raised, but her lips were red with blood. 

Cross tried to grab her, but she eluded his hand.  He didn’t want to let her go, couldn’t.  He had to protect her.  He saw Snow, burning on the train. 

Gently Shiv pulled away, and the look she gave him told all he needed to know: he couldn’t help her now.

A blade of darkness drove into his side as Shiv and Azradayne met in arcane combat, their hands gripped in deadlock as their bodies swirled with immolated energies, black and white fire that fused the stone beneath their feet and made the air bleed.  Cross flashed in and out of consciousness, held upright only by the power of the weapon in his hands.  His eyes adjusted to the shifting gloom and he witnessed the source of his injury.  Shadows and black ice, a vast lupine shape.

The last Maloj to have slipped through the gate.  It had come for them at last.

Cross could only watch as the beast flung him aside.  He drifted through the air like in a dream, heard bones crack as he smashed against the stone and fell.  His spine felt wrong, and he lay there, bleeding, gripping the blade. 

He held Danica’s gaze for just moments before she and Ronan leapt at the wolf, hacking at it from both sides.  Blades in the darkness, slicing through shadowflesh.

Cross willed himself to move.  The ice-laden ground rubbed skin from his hands and made them raw with frost and blood.  He gripped Soulrazor/Avenger tight, knowing it was the only thing that allowed him to move.  Blood pooled beneath him on the floor, black-red fluid freezing to gel. 

The ground felt crisp as he rose, and his knees jarred with pain.  Everything shifted and fell to the side, like the world was sliding away.  He tasted the power swelling from the conflict between Shiv and Azradayne, the stench of dark fire. 

Cross’s vision flickered in and out, knife edges of consciousness.  He stumbled forward, chest heaving, eyes heavy, feeling like he was going to fall into the hole above.  Blood dripped from his mouth and ran cold down his skin.  The blades were heavy, too heavy, and he heard their voices screaming through his mind, panicked cries.  The air thickened and warped. 

He drove his sword through the Maloj’s black.  Dark light crept up the weapon and into his arms, numbing his skin and freezing his heart.  The wolf turned and knocking Danica and Ronan aside.  Its jaws opened wide and a terrible dark substance poured out and burned Cross’s body with shocking cold.  The temple shook.

Beyond them, Shiv and Azradayne struggled on.  A deep bass rumble knocked columns loose and sent them crashing to the ground.  Shiv’s spirits gathered around her, protected her, shielded her in cold fire.

The wolf cleaved through his side.  Pain exploded across Cross’s vision.  He felt organs torn, and his blood was on fire.  The swords kept him alive, painfully, forced him to keep going, filled him with life energies that burned.  Salty blood poured from his lips, and the weapon guided him as he stumbled forward and swung.  Blood splashed onto his face, the monster’s blood, dismally chilled and filled with horrors.  He glimpsed flashes of oblivion, fields of corpses and smoking cities, rivers of flesh and palaces of bone. 

He was thrown back against the wall, bleeding, broken.  Nothing seemed to work properly.  He couldn’t feel his body anymore.

Ronan was somehow still alive even though his face was covered with blood.  Danica’s spirit knifed through the wolf’s torso like a crusted crimson spear. 

The temple hummed with tension.  Hairline cracks ran up the walls.  Dust and frost rained down, and the crack of mortar sounded like breaking bones.  The voices in the swords screamed louder, a wailing song of terror, not just Soulrazor/Avenger but the other blades and the power in Shiv and Lucan, a choir of the damned. 

Hurry
, they seemed to say.  When Cross looked up he saw the hole had widened, the void grown darker, so black and fathomless he felt drawn in.  Never ending darkness, and pain.

Weapons hacked through wolf flesh.  A knife of white light seared through the wolf as it punched a claw through Ronan’s stomach. 

Lucan pushed himself up to his knees.  His rib bones were visible through the grievous wound in his midsection, and the meat of his muscles smoked and burned, but somehow he stood.

Ronan was thrown against the wall and left a spatter of blood.  His crumpled body lay in a heap.