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

The artifact weapon guided him.  With it in his grip he was deadly, unstoppable.  It made him more, and he hated it for that.

He held his breath as he moved in low, watching the grisly red-skinned creature.  It had deep yellow eyes like cuts and broken black teeth.  The muzzle of the wide-bored weapon pointed in his direction. 

A blast of fire lanced out and took the creature in the back.  Danica stormed out of the trees as the second Troj fell to the ground behind her, choking on its own blood.  A corona of light surrounded her like a blazing star.

Distracted, the Troj offered up no resistance as Cross came close and cleaved through its mid-section, spilling metal and guts to the ground in a noisy splash.  The beast groaned and fell forward. 

There were more.  Gargoyles descended from the sky and the nearby hills, and he could only surmise that they’d spotted he and Danica during their approach.  The grey-skinned brutes were armed with hooked chains and crude blades affixed to their forearms. 

Movement on the ridge above indicated the arrival of more troops.  He heard vehicles and shouts. 

“Go!” he called to her.

Danica shouted something in protest, but Cross didn’t hear what as he turned and took a gargoyle’s head off at the shoulders.  The creatures filled the air like a horde of armored bats.  Their edged armor glinted in the failing light as they crashed through the trees, snapping branches in explosions of dead wood.

“Get them to safety!” he said to Danica as he stepped close, leaned in and kissed her.  Their lips touched for just moments.

Danica pulled away and fired past him with the G36C, spraying hexed bullets into grey flesh and bringing several fliers crashing to the forest floor.  Cross turned and hacked through two more, then tossed a grenade into the trees just as a chain wrapped around his legs and pulled him to the ground. 

Everything spun.  Snapped branches and upturned roots painfully pelted his back and neck as was he dragged through the forest, and he barely rolled in time to avoid crashing into a tree stump and an upturned stone before his blade found the chain and severed it with a clang.  He saw gunfire in the distance, but no sign of Danica; he’d lost her somewhere in the trees.

The grenade went off, a thermal explosion that sent showers of sparks into the sky.  Several trees immolated in controlled burns that would extinguish in a matter of moments, thaumaturgic flames that wouldn’t spread but that eliminated anything living caught in their blast, including the half-dozen gargoyles and another Troj who writhed and twisted in agony. 

The fires went out, and the world was suddenly dark.  Cross rose, tried to gain his bearings, but before he could figure out where he was bullets ripped through the trees.  He ducked and ran, and he made it a few yards before he smelled the chill of smoking ice.  Hexed tendrils wrapped around him, and he severed them with the blade, feeling its sharpness as the ethereal appendages shrank back.  He felt the Raza’s spirit out there, swarming towards him, so he readied his weapon to meet it head on. 

Cross stepped backwards into a creek slain by night frost.  He ducked down and readied himself in the bank so whatever came for him would have to clear the rise.

Something black poured in at him, dark claws and white-set eyes.  For a moment he thought it was the Maloj, and his insides froze.  Fingers clenched and eyes set, Cross launched himself forward, not realizing until the last second that it was a trap – an illusory assailant meant to lure him out.

The shot took him in the neck.  He felt pain spread through his body as something steamed his blood.  The blades tried to fight it, tried to purge him of whatever poison it was that blazed like wildfire through his veins, but a chain launched out from a silhouette that moments ago hadn’t been there and ripped the weapon from his hands. 

His vision fading, Cross saw the Raza and a pair of men armed with edged chains, rough-looking barbarians with unkempt hair and thickset muscles.  They stepped in and pounded him with boots and fists.  A weapon found its way into his hand, Creasy’s old machete, and he drove it through one of his attacker’s chests; blood welled around his knuckles before a hard blow caught him in the back of the head.  Hurt whitened his vision.  He lost a few seconds, and then another jolt of pain seared across the back of his skull.

After that, nothing.

Danica.  I love you.  Please, get them to safety, get
yourself
to safety.

In his mind’s eye he sees her, in a golden field beneath the sunset.  They’re together, out of danger, at peace, where they’ll stay for the rest of their lives.

He knows this dream can never come to pass, but he has it now, and he holds onto it for as long as he can.

He came to on his feet, marching through the camp.  The forest was on fire behind him.  Fane seemed to enjoy burning things out – it was the easiest way to make sure they’d killed everyone.

His mind and motions were sluggish, his legs distant and uncoordinated, like they belonged to someone else.  The air was filled with smoke and fog and the night eclipsed the heavens.  The soldiers stood in crowds around him, armed with spears and knives in addition to their M-16s and G3A3s.  Torches set in the ground burned with white-hot flames. 

Near the center of camp their ranks parted, and a short but thickly shouldered man with no hair on his head stood before him. The man bore a severe expression.  He was hard and lean like a wolverine, and his dark leather and plate armor were bound tight around his body and neck.  Thick gauntlets covered his hands, and his eyes were pale, almost milky-white. 

“Eric Cross,” he said.  He didn’t speak with any sort of malevolent tone, just stating a fact, and one the man seemed loathe to admit.

“
Who the hell are you?” he asked.  “You’re not Wulf.”

“
Wulf doesn’t waste time in the field,” the man said.  “The Commander of the East Claw Coalition has better things to do with his time.  My name is Hasker.”

“
East Claw Coalition?” Cross said, not bothering to hide his sarcastic surprise.  “You’re kidding, right?”

The same chain-wielding man who’d helped capture Cross back in the forest  sharply elbowed him in the kidneys, sending a blinding shot of pain up his back.  Cross fell to his knees, and another blow landed hard against the side of his face, spraying blood through his mouth.  His vision blurred.

He was so tired.  Cross wanted to lie down on the ground and fall asleep.  He didn’t want to talk to these men, didn’t want to know who Hasker was.

“
Bring him,” Hasker said, and he turned and walked away.  The wind rose, sending icy flakes of snow slapping against Cross’s face.  The cold air stung his nostrils as he was dragged to his feet.  Someone had hold of him from behind – he realized for the first time his wrists were bound – and marched him forward, past the stone mounds and to the furthest building, a cold looking shack made of metal and stone. 

He looked around for Danica, or Ronan or Shiv, and when he didn’t see any of them he tried not to let his fear show.  Cold worry twisted inside him.

She’s fine
, he told himself. 
They’re fine.

Briefly he glanced back into the smoking forest.

Light spilled from the entrance to Hasker’s hut, a barren room with a single cot and table and a pit of ash and frozen light.  Hasker stood at the far end of the room; the chain-wielder and the Raza remained, and sealed the door behind them. 

Cross’s vision dimmed.  Liquid queasiness pushed through his throat.  He recalled that he’d been poisoned, that his arcane blade hadn’t been able to purge the toxins from his system.  He shook himself, tried to focus.

“What do you want with me?” he asked.

“
The swords,” Hasker said, plain and direct.  In a way, it was welcome.

“
Well, you have them,” Cross said.  “Can I go now?”

“
We also have
you
,” Hasker explained.  “And only you can use them.”

How the hell do they know that?
he wondered. 

“
Where are my companions?” he asked.

Hasker watched him, breathing loud through his nostrils as the firelight played off his pale and heavily veined face.  He pushed his tongue against his lips, then nodded to the Raza.

The woman was smaller than Cross had at first thought, barely a child, really.  Runic markings lined her face and pale arms, and her fingernails were as black as onyx. 

Smoke poured from her palms.  Cross tried to back away, but the chain-wielder held him fast, and he no longer had the strength to resist.  Ice blue mist swirled around his face, and the touch of it scalded his tongue.  His eyes locked open, frozen like pools of glass. 

He saw.

The Maloj’s claws lance out of the dark.  Every strike from its dismal talons renders another life unseen.  These aren’t the brutish killers they’d encountered at Rimefang Loch but calculating and subtle monsters, beasts with sinister agendas.  With each assassination their presence grows, surrounding the present like vast shapes lurking in the depths of a pitch black ocean.

Every strike kills more than a life, cleaves a hole in reality.  Creatures are sucked out of existence with such razor surety it’s as if they have never been.  Lives un-lived, destinies unfulfilled.  Time alters, not radically, as the theorists project, just subtle shifts, no hurricanes from butterfly wings, for the Maloj are careful: they see with clarity the effects their claws will have, understand with certainty exactly how things will be altered.  They are temporal marauders, twisting and turning time like a river until it leads where they want it to go.

The Maloj kill the White Mother.  It slips inside Ronan, and in the timeline that played out here was never found out, for the White Mother had never altered their destiny by delaying their ship, by ordering her most trusted White Council minions to lay the runes that sucked the Skyhawk out of Southern Claw airspace and into Nezzek’duul, a place protected by its own safeguards, massive arcane towers along its coasts which prevent foreign magics from invading unless they know precisely how to pierce those defenses.  She saw this reality, this new timeline, and tried to alter it by saving those she knew would bring about the end of the war.

How?  What are we supposed to do?

When the Maloj kill the White Mother, Thornn changes.  The city still stands, but the Alliance is weak, never able to put up much of a fight.  The Southern Claw fell years ago, easily overrun, and Thornn is now just a worthless outpost, abandoned even by the Ebon Kingdoms (not Cities).

He and Danica and the others didn’t know this, went unaffected, because they were protected from it.  Nezzek’duul’s defenses hedged them in, kept them shielded from this temporal horror.

Without the White Mother only pockets of resistance exist.  Fane is the East Claw Coalition, as monstrous and murderous as it was in their own timeline, capable of unspeakable cruelties and yet one of humankind’s only hopes.  Meldoar is another safe haven, held by the stalwart Gol, who fight to protect their human friends from a terrible fate.

He watches the cities burn.  People die by the thousands, cast into great pits or onto drill-shaped obelisks, and those who aren’t hacked to pieces and cast into reservoirs for the vampires to feed on are instead summarily executed by the toxins which flood the landscape.

The Ebon Kingdoms swallow everything, and soon occupy most of the north and the entire western continent.  Lights from the Claw Stations flicker like diamonds and blood, and the harvesting field are filled with screams.  Dirty towers glow like dim candles, and the cities are razor juggernauts, obscene jags of twisted steel and bone.  Vast fogs of pollutant stretch across the land like a sea of poison.  Iron railways trace veins along the cracked and blood-stained earth.  Red brick and dark walls, dismal sepulchers and cobbled mazes of flesh. 

Though everything is different, much is familiar.  Black Scar has fallen; New Koth still stands, ruled by a lich council after Cross saw to the death of the Old One, Knight.  His friends are still there, and they’ve suffered the same fates as they had before.

He never could have imagined a world worse than the one he knew, but here it stands. 

A landscape of waste, crushed stones, forgotten forests filled with blood-hungry beasts and forlorn necropolises.  Vampires roam the land in bladed warships and iron crafts, hunting down survivors.  Humans live in fear, either of the Ebon Kingdoms or of the Coalition.  It is a new hell.

He sees Danica.  She’s survived, moving through the forest.  Walls of flame and fire smoke surround her.

There’s no sign of Ronan, or Shiv. Cross’s heart twists like a knife in his chest.  The atmosphere is thick with grit and thaumaturgic backwash, hideous fluid rained down by a cadre of Raza assassins.  Danica has no choice but to flee, and she retreats back to the headlands where they first spied the white plume of smoke.  She’ll wait for him, he knows it.  She loves him, and she won’t give up.

“
Do you understand, Cross?” Hasker said. 

Cross heard the voice distantly.  The details inside the vision were hazy, and when he forced his eyes open the small iron room was still full with white fog smelling of something freshly skinned.  His skin was flushed with heat.  He no longer stood but sat on the floor, his back against the wall.