Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) (49 page)

NINETEEN

WARZONE

Kane took a deep breath.

“Relax,”
Turner
told him.

“
Are you my therapist
?” he asked her sharply.

“No.”

“Then stop telling me to relax.”

Kane
smelled ice, oil and gunpowder
as the ship
skimmed
over
the
brittle surface of the Dark
Sea, a
largely
frozen
marshland
between
the Bone Hills
and the
vast
tund
ra called
T
he Reach. 
A
ccording to Burke,
that
was where they
’
d
find
the
ruins of Voth Ra’morg, where
T
he Revengers and the Kothians planned
to
enter
the Whisperlands. 

It was also
where
Rake and his cronies
would
likely kill Cross and Black in the
ir
attempt
to get…something.  No one seemed clear as to what
it was Rake was actually looking for, but everyone seemed to agree that if he was going through this much trouble, it had to be something bad
.

The
cold
ship
rattled as it sped along. 
Kane saw
the black
and
marshy landscape
through the wide windows.  The land was
littered with icy reeds and mounds of frozen lichen, islands of damp earth and
giant
petrified mushrooms.  The
setting
sun
shone
red and gold as
it
sank be
hind
grey-black clouds.  Dark
mountain peaks
loomed in the distance
. 

Grey Clan skiffs
, bulky grey vessels with indu
strial turbines and heavy guns
, trailed Burke’s
squat and ugly
warship
.

Turner
finished
giving Kane
his
injection, an arcane healing solution made from a blend of salt water, holy oils and Type A Blood.  S
upposed
ly it would
help
purge whatever was left of the vampiric infection
from
his
system
.  Turner
shot
the fluid
into his arm
with
a
needle
he
thought w
as
roughly the size of
a broadsword. 

Under normal circumstances,
a single
injection
should
have been sufficient. 
Unfortunately,
time progressed differently in the Whisperlands than it did in the sane wo
rld, and so far as Turner knew – and
the book
-
smart
Revenger
seemed to know
quite a bit
– no
one had ever been bitten by a vampire
while they were
in the
shadow realm
and
then transferred
back to the physical world
before the infection had set in. 
Supposedly, coming back had actually saved his life, since the slower flow
of time
delayed
the infection process.

“But that
also
means,”
Turner
told him, “that the necrotic insects have
actually
been in your blood longer than
normal
. 
So we’ll need to continue giving you treatments, just to be sure
.”

“
I hate getting
shots
,” he said plainly.  “
They make me
feel like I’m going to puke or fall over.  Or both.”

“Good thing you’re a big tough guy, then,” Turner said matter-of-factly.  “Because you
’re going to be
doing
this for quite some time.”

G
reat
, he groaned in his mind. 
As if things weren’t bad enough.

Turner walked away with the empty syringe, leaving Kane holding a wad of
sterile cloth
up to
where he’d received the shot
.

The bridge of
Burke’s airship
was wide and tall. 
The steel was grey-green and sterile. 

Maur stood near the
cockpit
,
where he watched
the mostly reptilian pilot operate
a
complicated-looking network of
handles
, wheels and levers.  Ronan,
Sol
and
Marcus
checked
their
weapons, while Burke went over schematic readouts
of the area
.

How did things get this screwed up?
Kane
wondered. 
We’ve been away from Thornn for what feels like forever.  None of us expected
that
getting Cross back would be
so
damn complicated.

Or so costly.  They’d lost Ash and Grissom, and now it looked like they were in danger of losing Black
, too
.
  And maybe even Cross
himself
.

Never really thought this was how things
would end
, he thought. 

“
Kane?” Jade
came and
sat
down
next to him
on the long
and uncomfortable steel
benches that ran
along the
back wall of the
deck
.  The growl of arcane turbines filled the air with such noise she practically had to shout
to be heard
. 

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

He looked at her.  She was a
gorgeous
woman, far too
alluring
to be wrapped up with a scumbag like Klos Vago
.  H
e knew
what
she
really
was: a cold-blooded criminal, an enforcer more concerned with a paycheck than with who she had to hurt to
get
it.

“What do you care?” he asked, and
he
turned back to the long window so he could watch the marsh.

She grabbed his hand until he turned to look at her.

“Because I
feel
like
caring
,” she said sternly.  “Look, you and I started off on the wrong foot
, b
ut that doesn’t mean
things have to stay
that
way
.”

She was thin, practically a waif even
in
thick leather armor and
armed with
a veritable arsenal of
knives and hex grenades.  Her hand felt good in his.

“Decided to finally be nice to me now that
we’re all marching to our death
s
,
hu
h?
” he grinned.

“
Try to stay positive
,” she
said
. 
The way she said the words made it sound like she actually meant them. 
“
We
’ve
made it this far, and from the sounds of things
you’ve
made it through worse.  We should be okay…
”

“
Should be
isn’t good enough,” he said. 
I want to live.  I want Dani and Cross to be okay.  God damn it, things were good before that mission into the Bonespire.
I just want to go back to the way we were.
“
Look, just…
don’t try to make me feel bette
r,
OK
? 
As things stand
,
we don’t have much of a chance of getting your bosses’ job done.
 
Speaking of which
…
why are you still
even
here?”

“Excuse me?”
she asked.

“What’s your stake in all of this?  It’s not like you guys give a crap about Cross, or anything.”

“Burke hasn’t exactly offered to send us home,” she said
plainly
.  “What
else
are we supposed to do?”

“You could s
tay out of it,” Kane said matter-of-factly.  “Mind your own business.”

“Is that what you’d do?”

“It’s what I’d do if I knew I wasn’t wanted.”

She gave him a wry smile.

“Did it ever occur to you that we may actually
want to
help?”

Kane looked into her eyes.

God, I want to believe
her
.

“You mean you and Sol?”

She hesitated, just for a moment, and nodded.

“Yes.  Me and Sol.”

“No,” he answered.  “Your interest in me extends only so far as getting Vago what he wants.”

Jade
laughed.  He could tell she was exasperated.

“
Ok,” she said.  “
Never mind then,
” she said.

He almost stopped her
from leaving
, but
he
didn’t. 

For a few minutes,
while
the rickety airship
flew low
over black waters and the sun
started
to set
and
they
approached
the ruined city-state of Voth Ra’morg,
Kane
sat alone.
 
He longed for things to return to a place they never could.  He was afraid, so afraid, because he knew this couldn’t end well, that more of them would
die
.  A fist of pure fear slammed down his spine. 

He would do what he had to do.  He’d fight
to
his last breath
to save his friends.  But Kane knew they were
already
lost.

Voth Ra’morg was a shell. 

The ruined structure came into view just as the sun set over the eastern horizon.  Jagged stone walls and rusted steel towers glowed faint grey-gold in the
light of the
dying
sun
. 
B
lack and icy marshlands
surrounded
the
ruins
.  A
thin and crumbling network of earth and wood
en
walkways
provided safe passage
across the dark bog. 
Tendrils of
green
m
ist hovered just over the water
, and
wooden
stakes
surrounded
the
desolate
city like a
ring
of black blades.

They weren
’t
the first to reach the ruins:
T
he Revengers had beat
en
them
there
.