Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) (44 page)

She
snapped to and stood up
as the door opened
. 
Danica
looked for a
n opportunity
, but
she
quickly
realized
this wouldn’t be it.
  Two Scarecrows stood in the doorway
with
jury-rigged 20mm rifles
aimed
straight
at
her
chest
.  T
heir leering and near
ly
skeletal f
aces seemed
to grin. 
The corridor
was filled with
dim
red
light, like they stood in a darkroom. 
Danica had to squint to see. 

“Slowly,” Raven’s voice commanded from
deeper in
the hall.  “Try anything stupid…”

“Yeah,
yeah,
I know,” Danica said.  She was too weak and exhausted to
fight the
Scarecrows without the aid of her spirit,
so she quietly stepped forward and
offered
up
her wrists.
 
They cuffed her with cold iron and led her down a long corridor
lined
with vault-style doors. 
The steel was riveted and stained.  Everything smelled like
fuel
and sweat.

The Ironnaught lurched as they led Danica up a steep set of
metal
stairs. 
The Scarecrows flanked her front and back
, while Raven
stayed
in
the rear.  The grave-rot stench
of the undead
was gut
-
wrenching
. 
 

“So where are we?” Black asked.

“Just walk,
bitch,
” Raven said.  Her voice was smooth and
cold
. 
“
No talking.  And don’t screw with me: y
ou don’t need to be in one piece for what Rake has planned for you.”

Danica’s legs ached, but she’d
done her best to
rec
over her strength
while she’d rested
.  The stairway
shaft was
barely
lit
with
dim red bulbs set in iron
wall-
brackets.  She looked up and saw no end to the stairs, just
more
grilled landings and
darkness.
  They’d climbed maybe five
floors
already.

Screw it.

She waited
until
the Scarecrow in front of her reached the next landing.  Danica threw her
body
back against the Scarecrow behind her while she held
onto
the railing. 
The undead’s
spindly legs slipped just enough for her to
shove
it backwards
, and i
t
lost its footing and
crashed into Raven
.  T
hey both fell down the steps
and on
to the landing be
low
.
             

She sense
d
her spirit
.  H
e
was
free from Raven’s grip
, and
he
rushed to her like they’d been separated for years.  Her skin flush
ed
hot from his presence
. 

The Scarecrow in front of her turned. 
It couldn’t maneuver
in
those tight quarters
, so Danica
duck
ed
down
and
grab
bed
the
sid
e of the four-foot long 20mm cannon
.  The trigger sounded, and if not for her spirit shielding her the roar of
the
weapon
would
have
blown
her eardrums apart.  The air glowed hot white.  Shells pounded into the wall and the other Scarecrow.  Danica tried to aim for Raven, but the
Scarecrow
that
she
struggled
with
reached up and grabbed her by the neck. 
D
ead fingers
that smelled
of
burned meat closed around her throat.

Her spirit hardened into an
ic
y
blade
, and
s
he arched backwards and drove
it
into the Scarecrow’s oversized face.  Teeth and
bone shattered
. 
Its
grip held for a moment, then faltered. 

Danica
charged past the brute and
up
the stairs
three
at a time.  Part of her wanted to
go
back and finish off Raven, but she
heard movement down below
. 
Revengers, more Scarecrows. 
She ran.

The stairs
just
kept going. 
A
brighter light appeared
far overhead
as a
door opened
somewhere near the top of the stairwell
.  Black’s
heart
leapt into her
throa
t.  Voices
came
from above. 

She looked around.  T
here was a small door on t
he landing she’d stopped on.  She pushed
it open
,
moved through
and closed it
behind her
as quietly as she could.

She stepped through d
ark
clouds
of cold
steam. 
The smell of chemicals was strong
.  Danica crept forward along a stark metal corridor. 
D
eep blue lights cast a path of bruise shadows.  She struggled to peer through the
frost
-black haze.

Dripping shards of ice clung to the
steel
.  The
air
hum
med
with
machinery.  Danica tasted aged metal and salt.  She heard voices in the distance, cold and alien
. 
Thick pl
umes of
smoke
billow
ed
out of the walls
.  She saw faces
in the fumes
, leering and distorted. 

Her spirit pulsed
against her skin. 
H
e sense
d
something ahead, something she
couldn’t
make sense of. 

S
he inched forward. 
Her breaths
clouded
in
the air.  Cold steam curled
around her feet as
she
stepped
through
broken pale light
that pushed
up through the grill
beneath her
.  She couldn’t see anything below
except
shadows
and smoke
. 

Danica
kept looking b
ack
.  She
expect
ed
the hatch door to fly open
at
any second
, but it didn’t. 

Her feet found a hole.  A narrow ladder led down.  The passage continued on, but she made the descent
almost without thinking
.  Her spirit clung protectively to
her skin.  The ladder was cold
,
and
it
was
covered in something
that
felt
like ice but
was
actually some
congealed
slime
that
clung to her gloves.

She descended
into a claustrophobic room
filled with
tilted shadows.  Massive devices like boiler tanks pushed in
at her
from all sides.  The air was oppressively hot,
but
dark ice had
somehow
formed on the walls. 

What the hell are you up to, Rake?

She found
a large cylindrical tank filled with churning green and black fluid. 
A second tank waited nearby, and a third, all tightly arrange
d.  Dark soil covered the floor
like someone had spilled dirt.  Danica leaned down, and found bones in the
soil
.

Shapes writhed in the
liquid
.  Humans
stripped of their flesh, now turned
to
black husks of charred
and wriggling
meat.  They hung upside-down in the murky
fluid
, tethered
to
metal hooks and glass tubing and surrounded with
cables and wires that
moved
like undersea life. 
Dark
juices
were
pumped
out of
t
he
tanks
and
into
a
humming and
virulent machine
the size of a refrigerator. 
The machine’s
iron face bore a clear glass plate, a viewport to the guts of the
device
where a dozen or so separate containers
had been
filled with
different colored fluids
.

The bodies
sagged as if being deflated.  They
looked less like
human corpses
and more like leather sacks
with each passing second
.  The black
muscles
sucked inwards, pulled tight
,
contorted like burning plastic.  The faces
crinkled in
a
nd
the eyes bulged and sagged down.

“What the hell?”

Her spirit screamed.  Something in that fluid, in those bodies, made it recoil.  She tried to restrain him, and suddenly found she couldn’t. 

Because he wasn’t there.

A Scarecrow stepped out from around one of the machines
and aimed its weapon
at
her.  A pair of war wights followed
.
T
heir peeled skulls and razor talons
shone in
the dull light. 

A Fade was with them, but it wasn’t Raven.  It was Gath.  The wiry
Islander
cell mate who’d kept her and Co
le safe for
the
promise of sexual f
avor
s
was there, dressed in a Revenger’s dark armor. 
He smiled warmly.  Danica felt waves of power emanate from him, that null field that kept her spirit from doing anything.

“You bastard,” she said.  “Of course.  No wonder you were able to keep me and Cole safe and well fed.  I should’ve seen right through it.”

“I still want that threesome,” Gath smiled. 

Danica backed away. 

She heard
footsteps on the walkway overhead. 
She
knew she
could
have
dodge
d
into the maze of machinery and floating bodies, but she didn’t know if there was
another way out, and with two F
ades nearby
the
only weapon
she had
was useless.

Not yet, then. 

She held up her shackled hands, and was taken.

The upper decks of the Ironnaught were
in
chaos.  Revengers moved about frantically.  Danica got the impression the ship was in highly dangerous territory and might have
even
been under attack, except
that
she couldn’t hear any s
ounds
of battle. 

The halls were made from black iron.  Wide corridors led to cross-halls and large chambers
.  Every door
stood
open,
allowing Danica to peer into
t
he officer
’s
rooms and map chambers,
and she saw
the navigation
console
and the master gunnery.  Scarecrows stood at almost every intersection
.  S
he felt the distinct presence of war wraiths and murder spirits
as they
float
ed
through the ventilation ducts.