Sword and Shadow (10 page)

Chapter Fourteen

The crewman gave out a shrill oath and leaped away as a black shape descended from the sky to alight on the deck less than a foot away from the hatch leading to the hold. The monstrous crow or raven—he wasn’t sure which it was—cocked its head and stared at him with a frightening intelligence moving behind its eyes. It hopped to the hatch and peered at the latch holding it closed, then reached out with its beak and casually popped it open. It rapped on the hatch twice and jumped away as it began to slide open.

The sailor gave a cry and drew his long knife, thinking that he’d simply kill the bird and lock the hold down once again, but something struck him on the back of the head with enough force to drive him to his knees. As he knelt there, blinking away the stars circling inside his head, a second black bird settled on the deck before him, wings rustling into position. It glared at him in an unmistakably threatening manner as the hatch flipped open and the top of their prisoner’s head came into view.

She clambered onto the deck just as a group of seaman arrived, led by the first mate. “Don’t kill her!” the first mate ordered, as they moved to surround her. The two birds took to the sky as she stepped away from the hole, eying them all with a distinctly disdainful air.

“You couldn’t kill me if you wanted to,” she told them. “I’d recommend you step back and allow me to leave unmolested.”

“Not going to happen, lady. Raven said—“

“Raven’s wishes are hardly my concern,” she interrupted casually.

The name she’d given the vampire had been a false one, and her apparent injuries greatly exaggerated. Though he certainly had the capability of hurting her, he hadn’t done her nearly as much harm as www.samhainpublishing.com 95

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she’d pretended, and had healed far quicker than anyone would have expected. The warlocking he’d laid on her was something of a nuisance, but she’d figure out how to unbind herself soon enough.

The first mate was obviously unimpressed. “Take her,” he ordered.

She sighed. Five men with long knives against one unarmed woman.

Hardly fair.
Too bad for them.
She gestured and her crows screeched as they dropped from the sky to alight on the crow’s nest far above the battle—if one could call it a battle at all.

It took her less than thirty seconds to subdue all five, armed or not, tossing them into the hold one by one. Shaking her head and chuckling to herself, she set the latch and looked around. The other seven or so crew members were nowhere to be seen. Neither was the captain. She found that rather odd but thought nothing of it as she walked to the edge of the deck and leaped over the rail, dropping the thirty or so feet to the ice below without hesitation.

The cold was uncomfortable, but hardly life-threatening to her. She set out across the ice toward the red monolith, her two crows wheeling above her head in great circles as she trudged onward, grumbling. She’d be all too happy to slap that vampire upside the head once she found him. She hated it when people deliberately made her life difficult.

She found the decapitated body and crouched next to the head, turning it so she could see the face. “Oh, Tyr, you asshole. Still following Odin around like he’s got a pork chop in his pocket, I see.” Then she shrugged. “Well, not now you’re not. I could have told you he’d get you killed eventually.”

The vampire was a formidable foe, no doubt. He was easily as tough as most immortals, and utterly ruthless when necessary. Possessing that quality in abundance, the woman knew how vital it could be when one was considering the prospects of survival.

She didn’t fear Raven precisely, but she knew enough to be wary of him. More than Tyr had grasped, anyway. The sight of the corpse laying there had sent a definite chill through her, because she knew all too well 96

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what it meant. Tyr had been armed with a crystal weapon, and now Raven had it—she would be willing to bet.

Odin had no idea what he was up against here and the realization brought a smile to her sultry lips. Odin might be a hard-ass, but he had no experience with the likes of Raven. He looked like a kid. No immortal should fall into the trap of underestimating someone based on their appearance, but Odin—despite his reputation for wisdom—had never been the most perceptive of the immortals she’d known. At least not when it came to people. Situations, sure. But even Loki could read people better than the one-eyed could.

Shaking her head, she raised her eyes to scan the spires and razor edges of the ship rising out of the ice. As she threw up her arms, her two over-sized ravens dropped from the sky and swirled around her. The spell locking her away from mana began to unravel as they plucked at it with their scavenging talons. She felt a rush of heat and inner fire as the spell disintegrated.

As dangerous as the vampire was, she’d been at this business far longer than he had been alive
or
undead.

Nothing stopped the Morrigan for long.

The shambling mass swung one tentacle out as the vampire ducked, striking the bulkhead behind him with a wet
smack!
Val fired off a telekinetic punch that had little discernable impact if any against its soggy mass. “The goddamn thing’s like a bowl of jello!” she shouted.

The crystal sword lashed outward, sending a tentacle spinning away and a high-pitched keen shredded the room. This was the third monster they’d encountered, leaving Val wondering if this ship was nothing more than some mad scientist’s mobile laboratory. Each beast seemed worse than the last. This one had risen up from the pool in the center of the room like some Lovecraftian horror as soon as they’d all stepped through the doorway.

Cerberus launched himself into the midst of the creature, huge teeth ripping at the dripping morass of what looked like seaweed, snarling like www.samhainpublishing.com 97

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a buzz-saw gone mad. One of the creature’s tentacles flopped up and slapped the dog away. Cerberus hit a nearby wall with a shuddering thump and slid down to lay on the floor, unmoving.

This seemed to enrage Raven, who slashed out with a series of blows that cut great sodden chunks out of the monster. It keened like a teapot on full steam, a harsh whistling sound that cut through her ears like a razor note.

Goban leaped into the fray, sword driving for the center of the creature’s mass, only to be hurled back into the hall an instant later.

Val narrowly evaded a blow, sinking her rapier deep into the creature’s body. A moment later she realized she was in trouble. The blade had gotten stuck and she couldn’t pull it free. Suddenly she was swept up and carried in a blur of motion to the door, where Raven set her on her feet with a dark glare. “Stay here,” he told her, before spinning and launching himself at the creature once again.

The glittering sword swung out again and again as the vampire danced around the soggy beast, slashing through the wet mass with an ease Val could only envy. He’d obviously grown as tired of dealing with these weird creatures as she had. Though she had to admit, at least to herself, that he looked damned sexy dancing around with that shimmering blade in his hand, black hair flying around his face and eyes burning like violet coals.

Once he’d finished, he always had to retrieve that damn hat of his—

which she fervently wished he’d leave off for a while. What it was with him and his hat she couldn’t begin to guess. He always looked as though he’d stepped out of a holo-western. Or an old Bon Jovi video.

Not now. At this moment he looked like some barbarian prince, midnight hair streaming, the blade in his hand an extension of his arm, his movements sure and nearly as quick as thought as he hewed into the monster. He nimbly avoided a slash of one of the tentacles and drove the blade deep into the center of its mass.

Val leaned down and snatched the black cowboy hat up from where it had fallen as the creature, finally struck somewhere near its center, 98

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slowly toppled over backwards like a falling haystack. She held the hat, peering down at it with a glint of mischief in her eye.

She hated the hat. She would have happily fed it to the strange beast, had it still been alive. Anything to get rid of the damned thing.

Raven turned away from the fallen creature, heaving a heavy sigh as he hefted the blade to lie across one shoulder. “That does it. No more doors,” he said with a shake of his head. “Not on this level, at least.” He held out a hand to Val, who, with some hesitation, passed him his hat.

She wondered for just a moment why he seemed so unconcerned about Cerberus, but realized, as the dog raised himself from the floor, shaking his massive head as if to clear it, that Raven would know if the great beast was injured. Not only did they seem to have some uncanny connection between them, but Raven’s vampiric senses would tell him as much.

Raven placed the hat upon his head and reached into his jacket as if to check if his pistols had been unseated in the melee. He had yet to use them here. Val harbored no illusions that he restrained himself for her benefit. The crystal sword he carried now was much different in heft and balance than the rapier he’d grown accustomed to using—he needed as much practice as he could get before going up against Odin.

Or so she reasoned.

Raven knew that Val thought she had an understanding of why he didn’t use his pistols, because she hadn’t asked him. He smiled to himself. She would have been surprised to discover that his purpose for not using his pistols was many-fold. There were other things to take into consideration, such as a few issues of simple logistics. One did not fire off high-powered projectile weapons within a room entirely encased in alloy stronger than steel, unless, of course, one considered accidentally puncturing oneself or one’s companions to be a desirable possible result.

And, though she would never have believed it, he
did
take her preferences into consideration as well.

Not to mention that his 10mm hand cannons were simply too damn loud to be used in such an enclosed space.

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“What do you think all this is?” she asked him, as they waited for Cerberus to pass through the doorway in front of them.

He shrugged. “More immortal meddling.” He’d long before come to the conclusion that immortals meddled in much the same way and for the same reasons that mortals breathed. It was intrinsic to their natures.

Why this was he hadn’t a clue, but he found it constantly irritating.

Even the Crimson Sash, for which he worked and who deposited a large paycheck in his account every month, was run by a meddling immortal, but at least
his
boss didn’t seem to have a penchant for micro-managing. Athena, who ran TAU, was notorious for it. It wouldn’t have surprised him in the least to have her pop in to check up on Val’s progress at any point in time.

He didn’t work for Sash because he held any particular love for its goals and objectives, but because he knew
someone
with more sense than a rabid goat needed to be out here in the backwaters looking for signs of Cen influences. The bugs weren’t about to give up their quest for total domination of all the variant Earths just because they’d been beaten on Earth Prime.

Raven’s hatred of the Cen was one of the few strong emotions he allowed himself these days. Or had been before he’d met Val. The emotions she evoked in him, quite effortlessly, were strange and discomforting. Lust he could understand, and even deal with on the short term, but she fascinated him far beyond his interest in her lithe, well-muscled body. Her dedication, however misplaced, was something he could appreciate and even envy just a little bit. Raven, when it came down to it, was only dedicated to three things: the eternal war against the Cen, his own comfort, and the protection of man’s best friend. The job he did for Sash came in a distant fourth.

The oddest thing was that her arrival had provoked him into undertaking another mission, one of opposition to the Church of the Three-Fold God, primarily because her mission conflicted with the burgeoning rebellion’s need to acquire tools with which to fight the Church. His heretofore mostly ignored duty to the Crimson Sash and their alliance with TAU, however misguided, had prompted a distinct 100

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feeling of guilt when he’d been forced to act on their behalf to throw a wrench in the rebellion’s plans.

The last thing he wanted or needed were things that complicated his life. As it turned out, however, he’d been given far too little choice in the matter.

You, Raven,
are a self-absorbed bastard,
said that tiny voice in his head that had been bothering him for weeks.

Not to mention crazy,
he replied mentally.
The minute these little
exchanges turn into full blown conversations, I’ll know I’ve lost it.
The thought worried him a little more than he wanted to admit, even to himself. He knew that some vampires
did
go insane. He just never thought he’d be one of them.

There’s insane and there’s insane,
the little voice whispered, being no help at all.

Val stopped him with a hand to his shoulder as he started to duck through the doorway. “Are you all right?”

He shared with her the tiniest of smiles, a bare twitch of his lips.

“About as well as could be expected.”

She cocked her head at him. “That’s hardly an answer, Raven.”

“I’m fine,” he sighed, and brushed past her. A couple of steps into the curving hallway, he stopped and turned back to look at her again.

“Something is very wrong here and it bugs me that I can’t figure out what it is.”

She snorted, shaking her head. “You mean it isn’t obvious?”

“I’m referring to things beyond the obvious,” he said. “Yes, a big starship parked out here in this frozen wasteland, full of labs and strange monsters—these things are pretty damn wrong. But what is really sticking in my mind is a basic question—what the hell is it all for?”