Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (35 page)

Voices slithered through the air in a soiled tide.  Cross heard unintelligible whispers, maddened shrieks, cackles in disturbing mockeries of human laughter.  The ebon bodies on the other side of the crumbling shield were vast and dark, colder than the void of space.  Fear clenched his insides, and Cross’s already chilled skin felt like it had been splashed with ice water.

“
What the hell...?” he muttered.

“
It’s all right,” Lucan said.  He looked apprehensive but not afraid, doubtless having seen this all before.  “The barrier will hold.  For a while.”

“
What the hell is it?” Cross asked, but he didn’t need the answer.  The Black waited on the other side – the Maloj in their chaotic natural form, a swarm of teeth and hunger, hatred and blight melted into a greasy dark ocean, just waiting for the walls to rupture.

“
The border between worlds,” Lucan said.  “We’re beneath Bloodhollow, where the boundary has grown weakest.  We don’t have much time, and we’ll need all of the swords to repair the damage.”

“
All of the swords...shit.”  Cross watched the brittle walls.  The old fear of falling into nothingness was replaced by one of being crushed.  Those black walls were pushing in.  The darkness would swallow them all.  “That means Danica.”

“
And Shiv,” Lucan said.  “And me.  You see, Cross, Shiv and I combined are the fifth and final sword.  I’ve been looking for you for a long time.  Because it’s time to end this.”

NINETEEN

SHADES

Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

Somehow, they’d lived through the night.

Danica and Raine sat watch at the edge of a low crater surrounded by shattered boulders and snapped saplings still smoking from artillery fire.  The purple sky was as swollen and dark as a bruise, cut with streaming black clouds and dark fliers whose shrieks rang loud in the budding dawn.  Danica’s armor coat had been all but ruined, leaving her in a dark tank top that did little to combat the cold; her spirit tried his best to help but she held him back, wanting him to save his strength until they got into another fight, which would be soon.

It had been a hellish night.

The Doj had led them through fields of smoke and shattered granite monuments.  Dracaj had slaughtered all of the other giants, and as Danica and the remnants of the team followed the last into the fog they came across the behemoth husks of dark-skinned warriors with torn skin, dangling intestines and eyes locked open in horror.  To their credit the Deep Doj had given as good as they’d received, and several draconian corpses littered the ground, smashed and torn, the greasy green remains smeared across the hard mountain floor. 

Only the smoke had saved them, and Danica knew it was somehow no natural phenomena, though she hadn’t been the one to conjure it.  She wondered if the giant hadn’t somehow managed it himself; she’d never heard of a Doj with magical abilities, but she’d be the first to admit she knew little of the enormous race, especially these deep giants who were so adept at staying out of sight.  Wherever it came from, the brume concealed their passage up the slope and into the forested foothills where they eventually lost their pursuers, but based on the rapport of hissing calls that sounded through the night the Dracaj had gathered reinforcements for the hunt.

She heard the reptiles in the darkness.  The echoing quality of the sky made it difficult to determine how near or far away they were, but Danica watched for shapes in the green fog, and she expected scaled killers to appear at any moment with their lashing tails and sabre-sized claws.  She sat tensed, the G36C held ready, while Raine covered the other side of the low crater.  Sticky water dripped down the cracked trees, and snapped twigs and broken scree shifted beneath her boots.  Maur tended to Alvarez, who lay wrapped in a blanket, a bandage on his head and his shoulder still bleeding from a shrapnel wound. 

The giant sat quiet, cross-legged at the center of the crater, taking up most of the space.  His face-wrap concealed his misshapen face, and his crude battle-armor hung loose off of his massively muscled skin.  Dark eyes seemed to stare out at nothing, and he sat impassive, as if meditating. 

This sucks,
Danica thought
.

“
How is he?” she asked Maur. 

“
Not good,” the Gol replied after a moment.  Maur’s short red cloak was laden with forest leaves.  He lifted a small flask of water to the injured man’s lips.  “He needs medical attention.  Are you sure your spirit can do nothing?”

“
I can try again,” Danica said.  It was strange – while healing had never been her specialty, every witch and warlock’s spirit could do it, but when she’d tried to use thaumaturgy to bind Alvarez’s wounds the man cried out in pain, and instead of recovering more blood just seeped from his injuries and his body started to shake with paroxysms, like he was having a seizure.

“
Don’t,” the Doj spoke, his voice grainy and thick.  “He’s been soiled.”

“
Soiled?” Danica said.  “How?  He was hurt in the crash.”

“
That doesn’t matter,” he said.  “He’s breathed Dracajian air.  He is soiled, and must be taken from this place before he can heal.”

Danica hesitated.  She glanced and Raine and Maur, and saw the same question in their eyes that she held at the edge of her own thoughts. 

“What do you mean by 'Dracajian air'?” she asked.  “The fog?  We’ve
all
breathed it...”

“
Yes,” the giant said.  “Which is why we must go.  We must reach Bloodhollow, before it’s too late.”

“
Then what are we doing waiting around here?” Raine demanded.

The air was cold, and it was growing colder.  Danica balanced herself on the stone-packed slope.  The earth was tramped down and stained with blood.  Constant sounds issued from all around them, some of them natural, most not.  There was no need for a fire, as the forest was alight with strange green illumination, and they feared that igniting a blaze would attract the hunters.

“They will tire,” the Doj said.  “When they do, we leave.  Soon.”

“
Great,” Raine said, shaking her head as she wiped a slick sheen of cold sweat from her tattooed neck.  She looked at Danica.  Her face was severe, her short black hair mottled with forest grime and blast residue.  “We were supposed to learn what these guys know and take intel back to Meldoar, not go running around the wilderness getting attacked by snake-men.  We don’t have the gear, especially with two people down.”

“
I know,” Danica said, trying not to sound too stern.  Raine was a seasoned mercenary, but like the others she lacked a soldier’s discipline.  She’d seen plenty of combat but had been in few truly desperate situations, and predictably she was starting to panic, even if she’d never admit it. 

“
We don’t have a lot of options,” Maur pointed out.  Danica nodded, knowing her old Gol companion would come to her rescue.  He was a survivor if ever she’d met one, a man who’d been to hell and back, and worse.  She remembered when he and Creasy had been captured and tortured by Ebon Cities shock troops, and the Gol had been so badly injured they’d needed to send him back to Meldoar to get proper medical treatment. 

And then Eric and Ronan and I vanished, and you kept on surviving, fighting the fight when for all you knew the rest of us were dead. 

Most of their comm equipment had been ruined in the crash, and whatever it was that made the “Dracajian air” so toxic also seemed to bear thaumaturgic dampening qualities, as it interfered with Danica’s sending stone.  Maur seemed to think he could get a signal out using his short range radio if he could find a power boost, but one would be difficult to come by in the mountains.  If they were lucky there might be some salvageable equipment closer to Crucifix Point, but that seemed unlikely, since the place had seen a decade-and-a-half of being ransacked since it’s fall. 

“
We have to keep going,” Danica said.  “Or we fall back to the tracks and try to return to Meldoar, but that means going right into the heart of those Dracaj.”

“
What the hell are they even doing here?” Raine asked, directing her question to the giant.  “I thought their territory was deep in the Loch.”

“
They seek Bloodhollow, as we all do,” the giant said slowly, measuring his words. 

“
Jesus,” Raine said.  “Whatever’s there must be damn good.”

Silence.  Danica watched the giant carefully, noting how his eyes were locked and his jaw set.  Sweat ran down his bald head.  He was a hulking creature, towering over the rest of them even in his kneeling position, his abnormally large torso and oddly disfigured head lending him an unreal appearance.

“It is not what is there,” the giant said at last.  “But where it leads.”

Some hours later they left the crater and ventured into the soiled night, navigating by dawn’s cold light through the smoke and trees.  They moved like shadows, even the giant somehow eerily silent as they shifted through the gloom.  The sounds of the Dracaj had gradually faded, leaving the four figures and their unconscious companion alone with the cracking of twigs and the sounds of their own motion to accompany them as the fog gradually lightened, red to grey to white, a roiling mist that churned so thick it might have billowed straight out of a chimney.  They paused long enough to chew on dried strips of jerky and drink water; the giant had a bag with large rations, some sort of pre-wrapped headless rodents the size of dogs. 

Danica kept her spirit close, sending him out just far enough to seek danger but not to the point where he’d be difficult to draw back.  They saw motifs drawn in the earth, ancient runic symbols Danica didn’t recognize, likely markings made by aboriginal denizens of the forest.  Images of vampires and dragons had been carved into the trees, child-like, laughably monstrous in their crude depictions. 

They moved through a cage of wood and stony hills, locked in by brightly colored mist and miles of forest.  Cold sweat poured down Danica’s face and her nerves tingled with fear.  She expected something to come roaring out of the darkness at any moment, a scaled hunter or a vampire warship, a vagrant Bloodcat or Bloodwolf or some new horror.  The world was vast and full of terrors, and even with as much as she’d seen Danica knew there were many nightmares she’d never encountered.  It wasn’t an encouraging thought.

The giant stayed at the rear of the group, limber and silent in spite of his great bulk.  His black skin was stark in the growing daylight.  A great hammer was slung behind his back, easily the size of a small tree, and his cloth wrap dangled loose from his wide jaw, which the daylight revealed was oversized and odd-shaped like he was deformed.  His eyes were cold and he moved with a determined gait, a single-minded motion that made it so no one wanted to pause.

They were going to find Bloodhollow.  If the prophets and portents were correct then whoever controlled the city could possibly end the war, even if no one understood why.  The place had been a myth, it seemed, a fable.  Few had even heard of it before a few weeks ago, around the time when Danica and Cross had returned from their exile in Nezzek’duul, and she didn’t believe for a moment that was a coincidence.  Now the bitter race was on.

Bloodhollow housed a portal of some sort.  A way to The Black.  Danica could understand why the Maloj would want it, but not the vampires, and certainly not humanity.  Would good could it do them, to breach a doorway to the horrors that had torn the world asunder in the first place?

Their unnamed giant companion knew something more, but he wasn’t talking.  He seemed to insist they’d understand when they met some mysterious ally of his – a powerful warlock – face to face.

They moved through low darkened slopes that wound their way out of the trees, and around mid-day they pushed out of the forest.  They hiked across foothills, rock tors and drumlins flecked with trees.  The group walked the routes of long-melted glaciers.

They were within ten miles of Crucifix Point.  Its roads almost reached them, and to the north they saw taller mountains.  The shining surface of Rimefang Loch glowed to the west.

They drank and cleaned in tarns.  They moved slow because of Alvarez, even with the giant shouldering the load on his back like a pompoos.  The man was conscious only intermittently.  Capable as he was Danica had always thought Alvarez was something of a pain in the ass, but he was genuinely saddened by the death of Delgado, and she felt for him.  Raine and Maur, for their part, were both stoic, and carried on without complaint.  Danica was grateful to have them both at her side.

Soon.  We’ll be there soon. 

She had no idea what to expect.  They knew more now than they had before about Bloodhollow, and they still had no idea what they were walking into, or what would happen once they were there.

They were exhausted and on edge.  Danica’s body was sore all over, and it seemed it had been weeks since she’d gotten proper sleep.  They followed vague outlines of paths, pushed through dead grass and crossed shallow and brackish streams. 

The day wore long.  The land before them was wooded, the ground peaked, slopes of scree gripped in twisted roots.  Dust scattered in a low cloud, and as they climbed higher and the air grew thin and cold the fog finally started to fade away.  A few miles in the distance the barren slope crested at a red rock wall, a natural formation crowned with jags of glass-like stone.  The sky above was dank and grey and gripped with frost clouds.