Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (6 page)

When it came Danica’s turn to rest she dreamed of wolves, then of Shiv, and then of Kane.  She couldn’t make any sense of the dreams – they were more flashing images than sensible impressions, fleeting moments strung together by her cracked consciousness – but when she woke the warmth and happiness she’d felt the night before had all but washed away, and all she felt was terribly afraid.

THREE

TORN

They followed the Nightblood River.  Once they reached the junction near Stone Bridge they’d turn east for Ath.  The mist rose, and they found blood on the trail their first day out of Thornn – the drops had fused to the frost-addled ground, red on grey, a ring of coppery gel like a cycle of blood stars.  There was too little for it to have been a game kill and too much and too patterned for a gunshot wound, which meant only one thing: vampires had feasted in the area, and recently.

Cross looked ahead from his crouched position.  Towers of white smoke lifted from the other side of the rise; they weren’t quite close enough to determine the source, but they doubted it was anything good.  The ground was brittle basalt and dark chert.  They stood at the base of a system of knife-edged hills, dead forests and moraines thick with parallel ridges of blasted grey and black debris.  Rimefang Loch was just visible past the ice fields west of them, silvered by the pale glow of the sickly sun. 

“What happened here?”  Danica was at his back, standing watch over the sleds as dank clouds gathered to the north.  Thornn’s walls loomed in the distance behind them, high and straight, its towers just slivers of shadow against the horizon.  The air was stale and calm and ice cold.  Cross’s throat burned from the temperature, and every breath frosted and collapsed.

“
Looks like a bleeding,” Cross said as he stood up, his legs stiff.

“
Suckheads?”

“
I think they caught something and fed out here.  That’s why there’s so little blood, and it didn’t spray, it dripped.”

“
And there are signs of a struggle,” Danica said, indicating several flattened patches of peat moss and broken twigs off the side of the path.  “There, there...and there.  Awesome.”

“
Listen,” Cross said.  Standing side by side on the headland, both Cross and Danica heard a sound that had been building all day: a crackling hiss, like lightning touching down on water.  It came from the same direction as the columns of smoke in the distance, those dismal and ominous funnels of grey-white fumes.

“
Should we be going this way?” Danica asked.

“
Probably not,” Cross said, “but that means we’ll have to backtrack and head straight into the foothills instead of taking the lowland path.”

“
That’ll be tough with our cargo,” Danica said with an eye on Ronan and Shiv.  “God, I wish I knew what was wrong with them.”

“
Me, too,” Cross said, but he didn’t really want to know, because he had a feeling the answer would be something they could do nothing about.  “What do you want to do?” he asked her.

“
Well...people have been through here,” Danica said.  She’d been showing him the signs on the trail as she and her spirit discovered them: footprints buried just under the frost-laden moss, human hair snagged on the bark of dead pines, fresh ice recently broken. 

Cross looked back behind them, at Thornn’s shadow. 
I saw Bloodhollow
, the boy had said, like it was some sort of paradise.  What was it?  And why had he wished to go back?

What are we doing?  Why aren’t we just finding a place to hide and hold up?
Surely they’d done enough already.  If things were as bad as they suspected there wasn’t even a war left to fight. 
Haven’t we earned our rest?

But he and Danica kept moving, an unspoken understanding between them, a need to learn more.  There were too many unanswered questions, and too many events had converged for them to quit now – meeting Shiv, finding the swords, everything Cross and Danica had been through and somehow managed to survive.  It all meant something, it
had
to.  He couldn’t believe Azradayne was behind it all, that she’d perfectly maneuvered all that had occurred, even with what he knew she was capable of. 

There is no rest.  Not for us.  We’re here for a reason, and we have to find out what it is.

They’d both known the bliss they’d found those past few days wouldn’t last, and neither of them expected it to.  They had to return to reality, even with as much as they would have liked to stay hidden from the world.  Only by finding the truth would they know if they were safe, if they’d earned their rest. 

Cross took a breath and held it, trying to steady his nerves.  It was getting harder to will himself out of her arms, and it felt like throwing away a gift to keep carrying on when they both knew trouble and pain were all that waited for them.  Danica and Ronan and Shiv were all he had left, and their unconscious friends seemed dead already. 

Danica met his gaze.  It was impossible to measure all they’d been through together, how far they’d journeyed, how much they’d shared.  Together they’d learned how to deal with fear, and that the only way to live with loss was to carry on.  Their arms knew what it felt like to bear each other’s weight. 

All of my dreams of the future are about you.  When all of this is done and this nightmare is finally over I want to find a place without fear, a place without horrors, a place where I can go to sleep and know that when I wake there will be a better tomorrow.  That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Danica...to walk in such a place, with you.

But he couldn’t tell her that.  Not yet.  They had many miles to go before they could rest.

She saw something in his gaze and put her hand to his cheek.

“I love you,” she said. 

“
I love you,” he said. 

And they carried on.

They had to abandon the sleds.  The descending slope was jagged and rocky, the footing uncertain, but it would take hours to circumvent the area, and they’d be exposed out in the open much longer than they wanted.  That shorter way would quickly bring them down to the dry cedars running parallel to the river, where they’d have easy access to water and cover from prying eyes above. 

It’s worth the risk,
he kept telling himself, especially as his ankles strained and his back and shins started to ache.  It would have been handy if Soulrazor/Avenger would lend him strength, as it had been known to do from time to time, but as usual the swords had a mind of their own, and this time he had to go without their help.  Ice and dry rubble crunched underfoot, and more than once Cross felt his center of balance shifting, and he and Ronan almost went tumbling down the slope.  Their shadows fell long beneath the pale dry sun.  Lighting rings of blue fire waited at the bottom of the hill, natural gas vents which illuminated the darkness of the ravine.

After what felt like hours they finally reached the bottom, where they laid Ronan and Shiv down as gently as they could on blankets while he and Danica rested in the shallow clefts of smelted stone.  The air grew louder as they neared the river, and the wind brought the stench of char and lightning.  They were thankful for the light provided by the gas vents, faint blue in the failing light, as the sky had been overrun with darkening clouds. 

They rested for a short time, drew fresh water from the melted snow which was so cold it burned down Cross’s throat, and carried on towards the broken forest whose floor was packed with rime ice. 

The two of them constructed new sleds for their passengers.  Ronan and Shiv breathed, but neither of them stirred, they barely took water, and both of them were starting to look bone thin.  They needed to find a way to feed them, and soon.  Danica’s spirit filled the air with unstable heat as he poured strength into their bodies, healing energies they hoped would keep the two from slipping into death, but there was no physical change. 

Cross watched them both with a sickening feeling in his gut.  Those past few days he’d been solely focused on how happy the time had been for he and Danica, often forgetting that two of his only friends might have been in terrible pain.  Cross knew firsthand that just because the body was asleep didn’t mean the mind was at peace – he’d been unconscious and in the team’s care for weeks while his soul had wandered the black shadowscape known as the Whisperlands, desperately fighting for his life. 

Once the sleds were prepared they carried on and walked well into the night, pulling the makeshift supports behind them, postponing making camp until the gas vents were in the distance. 

The next day the sun barely rose above the horizon and the light it gave was cold and distant, as if muted through some sort of smudged lens.  As the afternoon wore on Danica showed Cross signs of other humans who’d recently been in the area: ice-bleached bones and boot tracks, pools of oil and shell casings.  The snow was hard and frozen, the air dry and clear.  Every breath he took scraped down his lungs and his skin was so cold from exposure he felt as if he sweated ice. 

Legs aching and backs sore they marched on, hoping against hope there was something good waiting for them in Ath, but not really believing it.

They came across the camp early that next night. 

Cross and Danica had come to the edge of the forest.  The Nightblood River’s icy shores were to their right as they continued to drive south.  They were near Stone Bridge, where they’d have to head due east towards Ath, or at least where Ath should have been – the clouds amassed as if intentionally blocking view of the city-state, the same place he and Danica had been bound for when the Skyhawk had gone down and somehow landed them in Nezzek’duul. 

They sensed motion ahead, so Cross asked Danica to stay with Ronan and Shiv while he climbed a ridge of frost-cracked rocks and greying weeds to investigate.  It would have been easier to use the spirit to probe ahead, but if there were any warlocks or witches in the area they’d detect such an intrusion, and until he and Danica knew who or what they were dealing with they agreed not to take any unnecessary risks.  They’d come too far to get careless now. 

We’re going to be ok.  We have to be.

He climbed slowly, and once he reached the top he peered over a crest of rocks and into a shallow valley smothered by white haze.  Cross looked into the remains of a village.  The buildings were old and makeshift, just heaped together sheds made of cast iron and brick, much like Wolftown but less stable and smaller, with no outer walls surrounding the structures.  Stone mounds formed a circle around a smoking fire-pit, the source of the white smoke they’d spied from afar; the mounds were made of obsidian and basalt, their edges glowing faintly in the daylight. 

Men moved among the mounds, soldiers and mercenaries in black and tan uniforms which Cross didn’t recognize, at least not at first; they weren’t Southern Claw and they didn’t seem to belong to any of the larger mercenary outfits he’d heard of, so he pulled out his binoculars to get a closer look.  There were at least a dozen men he saw clearly and even more at the far end of the camp, where a number of ATVs and a small tank were parked beneath camouflage tarps.

Whatever their affiliation these soldiers were well-armed and well-equipped, and it wasn’t until he saw the silver cloaked female, bald and pale and seemingly floating on her own accord, that he realized who these forces belonged to.

She was one of the Raza, a militant order of mercenary war witches.  Last he’d heard their services had been sold to the city-state of Fane.

“
Shit,” he muttered. 

Fane was led by a former Southern Claw commando named Gunter Wulf.  Under his direction they’d defected from the rest of the Southern Claw Alliance and launched an all-out campaign to take Seraph and overthrow the White Mother, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.  Rumors of an alliance between Fane and the outcast undead of New Koth had surfaced, and with the Ebon Cities closing in from the west and the new threat of the Maloj surfacing in the Loch the Southern Claw had found itself facing more problems than ever before.

I was hoping the Suckheads would wipe these bastards out.

Cross started back down the hill.  His boot caught on a loose stone and broke it away, and he only barely had time to grab hold and keep himself from falling when he heard Danica cry out.

“Eric!  Run!”

He heard gunfire and saw flames, smelled Danica’s spirit burn in the twilight, an ozone presence like turpentine and sparks.  Cross turned with the shotgun in hand in time to see a pair of gangly and enormous red-skinned creatures in dark armor push their way through the trees with 20mm cannons they wielded like rifles.  Static booms rang out and bounced off a hard shell of crackling red fire.  Danica’s shield held steady.

“Dani!” he shouted.

One of the Troj turned in his direction as Cross stumbled down the hill.  The cannon rose, and fear lanced through his gut.  Cross threw himself down the last stretch of hillside just as a blast tore against the stone and hailed chunks of rock down on top of him; he painfully landed in the thick frozen sludge at the bottom of the hill, knocking the wind from his lungs.  The shotgun flew from his hands, but he jumped to his feet and drew Soulrazor/Avenger.