Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (40 page)

When she was young, Danica couldn’t imagine the nightmare of watching a loved one die, for there had been no one to care for, no one whose loss she could believe would bring her to tears.  Now it had become a constant in her life, and her chest ached like a sliver of ice had been jabbed through her heart.

“
This way!” someone shouted.  More blasts sounded from deeper in the city.  Explosions rang up above from the strange tunnels that wormed their way into the massive ceiling.

They weren’t done.  The battle was just beginning.

Danica steeled herself.  She stared down where Maur had fallen, wiped the tears from her face, and turned back to the city.

PART FIVE

BREACH

They let the girl live. 

Reaver wasn’t sure if they would, even after he explained to the vampire Commandant how she was a potential asset. 

Soul energies pump like liquid through his body.  His arms and legs are whole again, reconnected to dark steel and powered with portable battery packs, and new blades are set into the housings on his forearms.  He’s given a new bone rifle and face-mask, and within minutes his brain swirls with numbing drugs and cold unguents which return him to a state of calm he hasn’t known in days.

For a time Reaver floats adrift in a void ocean.  He feels nothing, hears nothing save the vampire dirges and chants.  He drifts through fog, swims in red waters under the black skies.

He sees her.  He shouldn’t – the memories have been wiped clean, purged from what’s left of his mind when the new drugs are administered and he’s reconnected to the vampire collective consciousness, but she’s there.  The blonde woman, the one from his past, not Muse, two different people, separate but the same, bleeding into one.  He can’t tell which one is real.

There is no real.  I’ve been dead for years.  Whatever used to be me is gone.

And yet there she is.

Reaver is called to the deck of the lead warship.  The cabin pulses with motion.  High Jlantrian text scrolls across a dozen black screens around the tightly constrained room.  The turbines groan as the vessel slowly lifts off and pushes through grisly red clouds that look and smell like meat.  Vampire commandos stand at attention, rifles slung and mouths wide to reveal their razor fangs.  The sky is black and bruised and wreathed with unnatural lightning. 

It is a new ship
, Drake explains.  He’s an aristocrat, not a solider, a fact that is clear from the way he carries himself.  His eyes are too large and his fangs are enormous.  Dark runes paint his excessively pale flesh.

“
It’s impressive,” Reaver speaks through his grilled face-plate, for it is rude for a subordinate to answer to a superior through the collective.  That would have been the case even if he wasn’t a mere revenant.  “Three times the size of a Dagger class warship.”

You have an excellent eye for detail
, Drake tells him. 

The ships fly through the clouds.  Reaver knows there are ground troops as well as a dozen Razorwings higher up in the sky, staying out of sight.  This force will rendezvous with a Coffin before converging on Bloodhollow. 

The dark metal inside the cabin clicks and whirs as carefully crafted controls slide into place.  Pumps and tubes push hydraulic fluid through the bridge, and targeting read-outs signal in the air before the gunners. 

Drake circles in front of Reaver.  The vampire is a full head shorter than the revenant.  He wears a resplendent cape of purple and crimson and has long hair as dark as midnight. 

That attention to detail
, he tells Reaver,
doesn’t explain how you lost your team. 

Reaver has no answer.  He’s already explained the run-in with Fanian forces, and of how being disconnected from the Ebon Kingdom’s collective had adversely affected Razor Squad, leaving them discombobulated and ineffective against even an inferior force.  But that is not what the Commandant wants to address.

“The human,” he says through pouting lips, surprising Reaver by addressing him out loud.  “You say she may prove useful.”

“
She is a member of the East Claw Coalition,” Reaver answers. “I believe they, too, are looking for Bloodhollow.”

Drake considers him.  A lean and much taller vampire steps up and looks at Drake, and the way the two stare with their utterly black eyes without Reaver knowing what’s happening tells him they’re communicating on a hidden channel, a layer of the collective allowed only for officers.

Reaver thinks of the girl...Muse.  She’s slowly fading from his memory.

Good.  The sooner forgotten, the better.
He only vaguely recalls what she’s done to him, the echoes of memory she’s somehow resurfaced just by her resemblance to some dead human from his past.  He thinks of her, and an image of the blonde girl as she lay dying flashes through his mind, jolting him with sorrow.  He panics.

Reaver
, Drake thinks to him. 
What is it?

“
I need to be brianwiped again, sir,” Reaver says.

His master considers him, and nods his ascent.

Dying in his arms.  So pale, paler than she’d ever been.  Friends stand nearby, though not long ago he’d wanted to kill them for putting her in danger. 

“You’re all I’ve ever wanted,” he whispers, so quiet she can barely hear him.  She’s cold in his arms, too cold, and he feels heat drain from her body faster than the blood gushing from her stomach. 

She’s gone.

His heart cracks.  Everything he wants, everything that’s ever made his miserable life worth living, is slipping away, and for a moment he feels the blade slung over his back and wants to join her.  He isn’t sure why he doesn’t use it. 

The warship lands at the edge of a deep crevice, a massive cave mouth twisted like the yawning face of a sleeping giant.  The ridge is made of cold grey and white stone blended together in swirls of alternating color, a frozen storm of rock. 

Reaver is on the ground.  His metal joints creak and his undead flesh pulses as necrotic fluids flush through his system.  The bone rifle is heavy in his grip, and the new blades in his arm housings are so razor sharp he can practically taste them.

Fifty vampire shock troops – Shadowclaws, most of them, clad in black and armed with twisted blades and razor garrotes, clawed hammers and short-range rifles loaded with incendiary rounds capable of ripping armor to shreds – stand along the ridge, while a hundred more wait in the Coffin that hovers at the edge of the cliff face.  Razorwings and their crews circle the sky, waiting for the order to descend. 

Reaver looks for the girl, Muse, whose name he remembers in spite of his memory being wiped again, but she’s nowhere in sight.  Some part of him hesitates at her absence. 

Information streams through his mind with the force of a raging wildfire, tactical readouts of the caves below.  The complex is vast, a natural hewn tunnel network which leads to the ruins of Bloodhollow. 

PROCEED the vampire missive says.  ELIMINATE ANY RESISTANCE.

They move through the tunnels in Creed formation, four vampires and one commander.  Reaver is one of the leaders.  His Creed stays close, weapons held ready and fangs bared, dark armor and pale flesh half-lit by crimson shadows.  He smells their lust and hunger, tastes blood on the lips of those who’ve recently fed.  Thick dripping stalactites and pools of brackish ooze press underfoot.  The tunnels curve and twist, and the invaders have to climb and jump down wide vertical shafts covered with cobwebs and dust. 

Stone faces have been carved in the walls of the twisted passages, yawning voids which lead off to deeper tunnels.  The corridors wind snake-like, an ant-farm made massive.  Lunatic angles plummet down jagged slopes and molten spirals of quartz melt into the crumbling granite.  Wisps of smoke swirl against the surface of the rock, and the echo of motion reverberates from far below.

Every Creed takes a different set of tunnels to avoid walking into an ambush.  Passages lead deeper into nothingness.  He sees strange carvings of razored angels and sinuous serpents offering sexual pleasure, massive spiders destroying cities, blasted frescoes of humans being drowned in a black sea. 

They come upon remains, mostly human, but not all.  Bloodwolves, Firehorns, vampires – scores of vampire jawbones, fangs and skulls have been carefully petrified in some sort of cryotic gel and fixed to the walls like trophies.  Whoever defends this place has killed to keep it a secret for a very long time.

He wonders about Muse, but then tells himself he has to forget about her.  He carries on.

Deeper down they cross ice-reamed limestone so desperately cold it shocks even his undead system to step on it.  The shadows shift unnaturally, and passing through them is like wading into a turgid ebony swamp.  Every surface is unnaturally still, like the place stands apart from time.  Hairline cracks run from the edge of the crooked tunnel to the floor of the massive chamber.  Darkly frosted dragons stare down on them, crumbling statues pierced with veins of ice and collapsing under their own decaying weight.  Thick mist swirls like a solid wall. 

In the collective consciousness he senses more vampires nearby, other Creeds converging on the attack zone. 

Whatever power is in control of Bloodhollow masks the presence of both itself and its forces.  It will be impossible to know what they face until they’re right on top of it, but that’s why each Creed sets detonation charges to clear space for the Razorwings and warships. 

Is she okay?  Will they Turn her, or kill her because he wasn’t there?  A memory comes at him unbidden, the blonde woman again, his love, dying in his arms.

The Creeds come to an enormous cavern meticulously carved from the mountain.  He sees smoothed surfaces lined with hoarfrost, spiraled pillars of petrified limestone.  The ceiling is hundreds of feet high, the cavern at least a mile across.  Crude towers line the far edges of the cave between the various tunnel entrances.  Rows of iron beams protrude from the ground like the teeth of a lower canine jawbone, and balls of green gaslight float up above.  Small portals in the floor lead deeper.

Reaver looks around, sees vampires ahead and behind, and wonders what he’s doing there.

The fighting starts unbidden: an explosion, a series of shots.  Vampires snarl as they fire bone rifles and blade cannons into the surrounding darkness.  A sniper takes out three vampires in quick succession before someone spots the building he’s hiding in and destroys it with a hex grenade.  Smoke and blood pour through the outer edges of the battle zone, and the rapport of gunfire and explosive blasts echoes through the frozen atmosphere. 

Reaver stays low.  There’s little cover aside from the buildings and the mist, and the human attackers are dug in.  He hears concern in the collective consciousness, questions as to how the White Children or the Coalition could have possibly reached Bloodhollow before the vampires, but there will be time to ponder that later.

Bullets tear through stone.  Fires burn deeper in the fog.  Reaver moves fast through walls of smoke and makes his way to a series of small stone pillboxes reinforced with ice-sheeted black iron.  He fires through the embrasures and spatters skulls with explosive rounds.  Bullets glance away and chunks of rock chip off the walls.  He fires, turns, fires, reloads, fires, all in careful rhythm, cut off from his Creed but unconcerned, moving effortlessly the way he’s been taught, even if he can’t remember who or what it was who’d taught him. 

Explosive blasts shake the walls and chunks of rock fall to the floor of the unnatural cavern.  Dark shapes take form in the shadows above as Razorwings and their crews push through the rain of stone shards and explosive vapors.  A great rumbling signals the  approach of the Coffin.

Reaver takes a bullet in the arm.  He feels no pain, but the shot forces him to drop his rifle.  Blades spring free from forearm housings and without even thinking he leaps forward and cuts through a man’s jugular, not noticing until the human is dead that he isn’t even a solider, just some wastelands brigand with ill-fitting equipment and an old rifle.  The figures in the smoke are outcasts, disorganized but with the element of surprise on their side. 

He slices through two more men who come at him with submachine guns.  Magic plays in the air, a twist of roaring spirits.  Flames and ice hail down in carefully controlled staccato blasts.  Vampires are skewered on frozen lances or set aflame.  Razorwings rip through the roofs of the towers while Shadowclaws cast dark grenades into the newly formed gaps.  Reaver breaks off a blade-mount but replaces it with one of his short swords.  He turns and faces a man coming at him full force

and suddenly he is back in the arena, watching her there at the edge of the battle, barely alive, held between worlds to force him to fight

and  Reaver barely ducks in time to avoid the axe blade.  He lets his attacker fly past him and cuts through the back of the man’s head.  The battle cries of the Bloodhollow defenders ring loud through the cavern, but Reaver barely hears them.  He falls hard against the wall of one of the adobe domes, his head spinning.