Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (33 page)

At first he thinks it’s the Ebon Kingdoms, a scouting or rescue party sent to determine what’s happened to Harpy and her band, but that notion is quickly quelled when the first Scarecrow steps into view.  Tall, gangly and covered in iron hide armor, the stretched and emaciated undead soldier is easily nine feet tall, with a wingspan that makes it near Doj size.  Another moves in the darkness below, and both clearly display the orange and black of Fane.  Their wide boots crunch ice and dust as they climb the hillside, 20mm rifles slung over their shoulders, their skulls visible beneath the rotted flesh that’s been pulled tight against the bone. 
             

Reaver readies the rifle and backs away from the cave mouth.  If he was alone it would be easy to elude their notice, but humans give off a stench easily recognizable to undead still in command of their olfactory faculties, and if she wakes and learns what’s going on there’s no telling how she’ll react.

He doesn’t intend to give her up.  In a quick motion Reaver winds the cord around the girl’s wrists and binds them behind her back, then pushes a cloth into her mouth and pulls her deeper into the cave and out of sight.  He slings the M4A1 over one shoulder and secures the cloth tight around his face, though he isn’t sure why.  Maybe it’s something he used to do when he was still alive.  He draws one of the short blades given to him by the Ebon Kingdoms and keeps the other secured to his back. 

Reaver steps out of the cave.  He senses the dull peat of the Scarecrow’s footsteps, the creak of leather armor.  They are neither subtle nor quiet creatures, and ultimately the lack of light will end up being a bigger benefit to him than it is to them. 

Night frost clings to the rocks and stunted trees.  Reaver crouches low in the shade of a twisted pine as wind trills down the hillside, keeping the nearest shadow in sight as it brushes through mounds of dried leaves.  Seconds pass as he waits, blade held ready. 

A shot rings out, so loud and piercing it’s like the world has cracked.  A shell strikes the hill not a meter from the edge of the cave, sending up a hail of loose leaves and pebbles.  Dust and stones sweep down the slope.  Reaver moves to intercept the shooter when something takes hold of him from behind.

Not just Scarecrows.  They have a revenant of their own.

By the time he turns the once-female creature is already upon him.  Her chained knives rip chunks of dead flesh and metal from Reaver’s back. 

He senses the nearest Scarecrow level its rifle and take aim.  He has only seconds to act.

Reaver moves, and the Scarecrow’s shot goes wide and splinters a dead tree into pieces.  He ducks beneath the revenant’s knives and rams his blade into her steel breastplate, cracking through the metal and using the heel of his hand to jam the edge home and split her black and oozing heart.

She doesn’t go down – the blade is scant inches too short to punch all of the way through, and another shot from the Scarecrow comes much closer, smashing stone near Reaver’s feet and forcing him to leap to the side.  Leaves and dead twigs fall around them in the dark.  He raises his weapon just in time to deflect the edged chains. 

Reaver dances back, and the revenant leaps at him.  He listens for the click, waits for the blast. 

He moves at the last possible moment, brings his blade sideways and cuts into the revenant’s face, throwing her off course so she flies into the path of the 20mm shell jut as the Scarecrow fires.  Her torso is torn into chunks of rotted meat. 

He turns, gathers his feet beneath him and rolls forward.  Concussive blasts tear into the hill.  The second Scarecrow moves to flank him: they have him in a V-shaped field of fire, so both have open shots without any chance of hitting one another. 

Reaver’s instincts drive him.  Whoever he’d been in life, whatever he’d been, that creature had been a capable warrior, and those natural skills have been enhanced and improved by hard-wired memories and the processed skill sets of other fallen soldiers.  He doesn’t need to think.  He knows no fear.  This is his purpose.

He launches his body forward and sends the curved blade through the air as another 20mm shell passes close.  Undead muscles tense as he lands face-first on the downward slope, knowing even before the blade is out of his hand that his aim is true.  Eldritch steel rams into the Scarecrow’s face, splitting its misshapen skull and sending it to its knees as its body convulses, cut off from the necrotic cortex which feeds it information. 

The blasts from the bottom of the hill strike the ground behind him.  Reaver rises and runs, races behind gnarled trees and low rocks as they explode beneath the barrage.  The second Scarecrow advances, and as its cannon runs dry it draws a wickedly serrated sword as tall as a man, black iron burning with runes and hex. 

Reaver reaches the first Scarecrow’s body, grabs its massive rifle and fires.  The force of the blast throws him onto his back as the shot rips the other Scarecrow’s head from its body in a greasy blast.  Putrid remains spread across the hillside. 

He stands, and waits.  The black night is again silent, but he isn’t about to take chances.  Three New Koth undead wouldn’t be wandering the area alone, especially so far from their own territory.  He races back up the hill, keeping the 20mm rifle ready as he watches the area for more signs of danger.

The woman lowers her head when he re-enters the cave.  She’s clearly been hoping he wouldn’t be the one to come back. 

Reaver isn’t sure why, but the notion that she would want him dead gives him pause.  Memories lie buried there, a notion of sorrow, but he can’t afford to let it surface, so without further delay he throws the woman’s bound body over his shoulder.  She growls and screams as loud as she can beneath the gag, but after a few minutes of him holding her securely the fight goes out of her.  Eventually he unties and ungags her, and they carry on their way as the sun starts to rise over the jagged line of the western hills.

“What’s your name?” she asks. 

Reaver doesn’t look at her.  They sit at the edge of a cool wall of mist.  Some aboriginal marauders once made their way through the area, for he and the girl had passed crude territorial markers when they’d descended into the valley. 

“I don’t have a name,” he says.

He’d killed a fox for the woman to eat.  He’d expected her to balk, but he should have known Fanian warriors were of a sturdy stock, with many of their numbers culled from the ranks of those they’d conquered, including the various wolf hunting tribes along the eastern plains.  She’d asked for a knife, and once he gave her one she skinned, spit and roasted the game over a small fire she built from scratch, and after the meat had cooked the woman was soon greedily licking the fat and juices off of her fingers after she’d scarfed the healthy portions down.  Bits of red juice are gathered on her cheeks, but she doesn’t seem to care.

“That sucks,” she says.  “Mine’s Muse.”

“
Muse?”

“
Yeah,” she says with a bit of an edge to her voice.  “Muse.”

“
I don’t think that sounds like a name,” Reaver says.

“
Oh, so you can think now?” she says after a moment.  “I thought everything that wasn’t a vampire just stumbled around and moaned for brains to eat, or some shit like that.”

“
It seems I’m not the one with trouble thinking,” Reaver says, and he keeps his eyes on the night.  Dew has formed and frozen to frost along the brown edge of the grass, and paths lead into the dead trees like tunnels.  Things gather on the horizon where salt water smokes into gas.  They’re close enough to the Rimefang to taste water in the air, and the land is softer, moister, the trees larger, if still dead.  Cedars and blood woods almost show signs of life, but their roots are black and draw fluid that isn’t water from the grim soil.

“
A smart-ass zombie,” Muse says.  “Fuck, I’ve seen everything now.”

“
Revenant,” he says quietly.  “Not a zombie.”

“
What’s the difference?” she asks. 

He doesn’t answer, and for a time she’s silent.

“
So where the hell are you taking me?” she asks after they’re back on the march.  The moon is a sickle of silver just barely visible through the drifts of iron cloud, and the forest canopy is blue and black like a molten bruise.  They step across icewood and frozen bog so stiff they couldn’t sink into it if they tried.

“
Bloodhollow” he says.

“
What’s there?”

Reaver turns and looks into the girl’s eyes.  He sees fear in Muse’s gaze, the first true fear since she’d started talking to him earlier that day.  They’ve carried on with little rest, but she’s grown bold, assertive.  He needs to quash that.

Even though I don’t want to.

“
Why are you here?” he asks.  He notes the strangeness in his voice.  He can almost recall what he used to sound like, even hears it, two speakers, present and past, echoing each other with the same words that sometimes feel like they come from anywhere but inside his head.

“
You captured me...”

“
Don’t play dumb,” he says coldly.  She gulps.  “What were you doing on patrol when you destroyed my team?”

“
I don’t know what...”

He grabs her throat and squeezes, and her eyes bulge.  Her bones feel so slender and brittle in his hand, so easy to crack, but he keeps his iron grip just tight enough to panic her. 

“What were you looking for?”

She gasps for air.  He slackens his grip and hopes she doesn’t notice, because if she detects weakness in him she’ll doubtlessly exploit it.

You and me against the world.

The memory of those words comes unbidden.  Reaver has to stop himself from reacting, from closing his fist and snapping Muse’s neck.  The voice from his past is clear, like the one who first spoke it

the girl the one Muse reminds you of

stands right at his shoulder.  More memories come, as if released from a stoppered bottle – making love in a cave, fighting in the arena, robbing Southern Claw caravans, escaping across the desert.  He’d never known anything good before he’d met her, and he’s been left hollow without her, a shell, a corpse already, even if his heart had kept on beating.

Reaver backs away and lets the girl go.  She falls to the forest floor, heaving for breath.  The walls of mist are thick, the night utterly dark and silent around them.  They might as well be the last two creatures left in the world.

Just you and me against the world.

He stands there, trying to compose himself.  Reaver isn’t meant to lose control, and never has before.  Being severed from the vampire collective is doing horrible things to him.  The memories twist his charred and blackened mind and leave him confused.  He isn’t sure if he wants to punch Muse in the chest and crush her heart or just hold her tight in his arms, but he knows neither is right, neither is what needs to be done. 

So he stands there, and watches as she gets back on her feet.

“Same as you,” she coughs.  “You undead piece of shit.  We’re looking for the entrance to Bloodhollow.  We can take control of the war, maybe even win it.”

She stares at him, defiant.  He can practically feel her hatred.

She so reminds him of someone he’d once loved it’s hard not to reach out.  Reaver knows that if she were somehow the same person from his old life he’d turn back then and there, leave the mission and defect from the Ebon Kingdoms.  It’s an impossible notion – he isn’t even an individual anymore, just a cog in a machine, an automaton hard-wired into a vast network of murderous thoughts and carnivore ambition.  The very urge to leave that collective should be impossible.

And yet it’s happening.  How?

He looks at her.  Muse watches him, and after a moment her rage and fear are replaced by puzzlement.  Reaver wants to ask for her help, wants to tell her what power she has over him, but he doesn’t know how.

He never gets the chance.  A blast of rancid wind sweeps down around them.  Floodlights break through the curtain of night and tear away the fog, and suddenly the world is a cavalcade of noise and light.  Two vampire gunships – Marauder Class, attack vessels large enough to house sizable contingents of troops – hover overhead.  Barbed chains dangle down, their hooks snarling in the dead trees.  Rotary bone cannons and flame launchers cover the underbellies of the dreadnaughts.  The blasting turbines issue the smell of death.

Muse screams, and Reaver feels something inside him, some spark of hope as it sputters and dies. 

The Ebon Kingdoms have found him.

EIGHTEEN

BORDERS

There were fires in the night.  Gold, cold red and jade, globes of crackling light that cast long shadows across the floor of the underground city.  Dust motes froze in the air.  Corridors were lit from within by ghastly green glows, dancing lights like will-o-wisps. 

Cross took in the breadth of the ruins.  The subterranean complex stretched impossibly deep into the underworld, columns of leaning stone, cracked granite and shaved limestone parapets.  The domed ceilings bore jags of sharp rock aimed downward like teeth.  It was an irregular and sprawling complex, vast and broken, an abandoned and forlorn necropolis.  The cavern ceiling was at least a mile high, filled with crevices and inverted canyons and layered with a sea of fog.  Massive chains dangled from the squat structures, their rusted links covered with bits of hair, cloth and bone.