Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (29 page)

Something was at the door – a wide maw of drooling black teeth as sharp as daggers.  Small hands made for gripping rodents latched onto either side of the open hatch. 

Raine lifted a Mossberg and blasted the creature’s skull into grey paste.  Another followed, and Danica cast a katar into its brainpan, the only way to put a zombie down for good.

“Maur, you alive?!” she shouted. 

“
Maur is,” the Gol responded.  He clambered out of the awkward pilot’s seat, his red cloak stained with oil and grease that must have exploded from the overhead tubing when the ship collided with the hill.  His bandolier contained a number of knives and grenades, and Maur grabbed a Mac-10 and a Model 36 revolver from holsters on either side of the pilot’s seat before he jumped down into the main room. 

“
How’s Alvarez?” Danica asked.

“
He’s alive,” Raine said.  Bloodstains pasted her short hair against the side of her face, but aside from a cut on her temple she appeared unharmed.  “Unconscious, probably a concussion.”

“
Delgado?!” Danica shouted, and she looked up at the gunner’s seat.  Delgado’s headless corpse sat there – something topside had torn away everything from the neck up and left a jagged and oozing stump, though from below it was difficult to tell if it had been the impact or one of the reptile zombies.  “Shit.”

“
Incoming!” Raine shouted, and she pumped another shotgun blast out the open doorway.  The shot went wide and only landed a small amount of buckshot into the reptile, but he was of minor concern – one of the Dracaj was at the zombie’s back, wide eyes perfectly black, grin dripping blood and amber drool.  Totems of power dangled from around its neck, and smoke seeped from its nostrils.  Danica smelled dead sealife and brimstone.  The stain of the Dracaj’ magic was strong, a wall of sickness that pressed in on them with physical force.  She felt the air turn toxic, and tasted black power. 

Her spirit sliced forward in a wave of crimson light.  She gave him full reign.  Boiling light wrapped around the Dracaj, burned through its primitive magic and seared its skin.  Its eyes melted and teeth burned away.  Something dark exploded inside it, a black presence like a boiling void.  The backlash from Danica’s spirit attack filled the inside of the craft with freezing vapor.  She heard laughter, a cackling and inhuman mockery of human speech. 

She tried to pull her spirit back, and found she couldn’t.  Lines of necrotic power raced back towards the source: her bloodsteel arm.  Intense pain lanced through her gut, and Danica felt a sick presence in her chest, like an oily beast had crawled under her skin and now intended to force its way out.

Like hell.

Claw and Scar slid from their sheaths almost without her realizing it.  The black blades glistened in the bloody light, darker even than the void which threatened to engulf her.  The weapon’s edges were so sharp they made the air bleed.  The swords came down on her spirit, and for a moment his screams filled her mind. 

The Dracaj fell back, its throaty voice filled with pain.  The blade had been designed to slay arcane spirits, to sever souls from their source.  Whatever the Dracaj had sent at her must have been some part of itself, raw elemental energy tied to its own life essence, for as Claw and Scar sliced through her spirit’s skin to get to the core of the taint that darkness raced back into its reptilian master. 

Danica pressed the assault.  Her spirit howled in pain, but she ignored him.  He fell back into her golem appendage, cowed and hidden, his outer shell shredded by the deadly blades.  His agony stained her soul.

I almost killed him.

The blades hewed through the Dracaj’s defenses.  They glistened with dark reptilian blood, and even as the draconian wrapped itself in a burning shroud the weapons seared through the cracks in the arcane armor and sliced the creature’s head from its shoulders.  It’s growls echoed through the ship as it fell to the rocks outside, and its slithering snake’s body lashed about violently for a moment before it sank to the ground. 

Danica stepped up to the doorway, gasping for breath.  Though he’d taken refuge in the armored limb she still felt her spirit’s pain and fear.  His exhaustion tugged at her soul. 

Jesus, what the hell did I do to him? 
They’d been through this before, back when she’d been Dragon, a brainwashed thrall of the Ebon Cities.  She’d nearly destroyed him every time she’d channeled, for she’d used her limb/foci to push him well past his limits.  Things had never been the same between them since, and while she’d tried her best to repair their bond in times of stress she sometimes forgot how tenuous their connection really was. 
That, and these damn swords. 
Claw and Scar weighed cold and heavy in her grip, shards of black ice that sent chills straight to her heart.

She heard fighting outside.  Danica glanced out and saw that the smoking ground was covered with corpses, both giant and Dracaj.  Shadows curled along the earth like banks of fog and cloud. 

“On me,” she said, and she jumped down, both blades back in their sheaths and her G36C held ready.  Gelid air swept against her, and her heart hammered in her chest.  The grunts and sounds of fighting echoed all around them.  She heard ballistic screams, smelled the crackle of ozone, felt heat from some unseen source. 

Something launched out of the darkness, an amoeba of limbs.  They fired into it and bullets shredded the unstable body, but the hulking creature ignored their shots and clawed towards them along the ground, its meaty fingers ripping into the stony hillside.  Danica called her spirit from his refuge, but he was hesitant, and she knew that to draw him forth she’d have to force him.

If you don’t, you’re dead.

Danica never had to.  A Doj stormed out of the fog, one side of his dark face marred by a massive claw wound.  The muscular brute growled and swung a maul the size of a tree.  The weapon tore through the elemental’s body and splattered earthen remains all over the ground in a rain of black and viscous blood.  A Dracaj’s throaty scream sounded from beyond the walls of fog, the elementalist slain as his creation was slaughtered.

The giant stood there for a moment, face hidden behind a cloth mask, his crude leather armor tattered and torn.  He turned, hunched, and looked out into the fog.  Danica forced her spirit to leave the bonds of the eldritch limb, and though he resented the intrusion he succumbed and she cast him out into the smoke pouring down the hillside.  Blades of bloody sunlight dripped through the brume, enough to illuminate the crystalline earth and make the slope sparkle like an upturned gem.  Water warm with blood gashed through the cracked stone underfoot. 

The rising sun made shadows in the folds of darkness, inhuman shapes, limbed clouds and smoking serpents, bladed tentacles and dying giants. 

“Maur, you stay with Alvarez,” Danica said as she checked her weapon.  Her spirit hadn’t gone far, and wouldn’t – the soiled presence of elemental spirits hung just out of sight, roaming like wild dogs in the darkness.  “Raine, with me.”

Raine reloaded her MP5K and checked the machete tied around her hip.  Danica saw a gash down her left side where the dark leather armor had been ripped open. 

“Where are we going?” Raine asked.

“
To help the other Doj.”

“
They’re dead,” the giant said, his voice rumbling and thick.  “They’ll die fighting, to make sure we escape.”

Danica watched him, her mouth agape.  The giant’s eyes were the only thing visible beneath the cloth mask, pure white diamonds in the morning light. 

“We can’t just leave them...”

“
We can,” the giant said.  “And we must.  I am meant to show you the way.  That burden falls to me.  If I fail, they will have died for nothing.”  He turned to go, his dark muscles tensing as he took up his maul.  “I am now the last of my kind.”  Without another word he moved up the hill, staying close to the ship long enough for Danica and Raine to prop Alvarez between them and carry his unconscious body along on their shoulders.  Maur fastened a bug-out bag to his back, and they moved into the fog. 

Danica could only assume the Doj had some directional sense or indication of where they needed to go, as the deep mists they waded into looked no different from the rest, a wasteland of silver-grey smoke filled with writhing shapes and echoes of slaughter.

They moved as fast as they could, keeping the giant’s great feet in sight.  Danica’s skin crawled, and her spirit wrapped around her body with a freezing embrace. 

She expected something to jump out at them at any moment.  Their boots crunched on uneven stones as they made their way up the hill, past craggy stones which loomed like grim faces.  The icy chill of the blood mists soaked them to the bone. 

We’re not going to make it,
Danica thought, but they kept going, deeper into the fog, on the trail of the dark giant.

SEVENTEEN

SUN

Year 35 A.B. (After the Black)

10 A.S.C. (After Southern Claw)

The truck pulled into the ruins of an old Southern Claw military base, and judging by the level of degradation and collapse Ronan guessed the place had been abandoned for well over a decade.  Cold moonlight played off dented and broken guardhouses and torn fencing, and the bones of Bloodhawks and trucks rusted in the dusty field.  Long shadows covered the ground on the other side of the shattered fence, and a pair of crumbling towers stood like ancient monuments near the main structure.  Blast marks, burn stains and coils of moss plastered the sides of the building like scars, and large chunks of concrete had been torn away.  An old sign stood near the main gates, mostly ruined; all that was left was the word “-sun”.

Warfield’s crew piled out of the M2 and took up position on the ground, backed by a band of lizard-riding Lith warriors she’d apparently recruited out of the wastelands.  The half-dozen men fell in outside the truck, and the ten Lith warriors silently dismounted, their bladed bows and curved swords held ready as they moved to defend the blasted gate and prevent anything from following.  With Ronan and the two men up front in the truck, that put Warfield’s forces at just under twenty. 

Not exactly intimidating.

“
Clear,” Torbin said.  He was a wiry and bearded gunman with wide eyes and a slight German accent.  He, Abraham and two others took point, while Ronan, the thauma-techinician Felix and Warfield herself followed close behind.  The driver and co-pilot, both thickly tattooed men Ronan thought looked like convicts out of Black Scar, stayed with the truck and watched the silent yard for signs of trouble.  A few Lith spread out and moved into the wreckage.

“
Then let’s go,” Warfield said.  “You know what to do.”

“
Do we?” Ronan said.  Warfield didn’t respond.

The graveyard of vehicles was eerily silent.  Bits of twisted rebar littered the ground, and in the dead and starless night the towers seemed ready to pounce.  The field couldn’t have been 100 yards across, but as they traversed the broken ground and dodged between ruined vehicles it felt like miles.  They moved towards the gutted building at the edge of the rubble-strewn wasteland.
             

Ronan remembered Shadowmere Keep, storming it with the rest of the team in search of Cross.  He’d have given anything to be back there, in that time before, or earlier.  Before his world had gone to shit.

Who are you kidding?
he chided himself. 
Your world has always been shit. 

The black-clad mercenaries converged on the nearest opening to the concrete structure, a gaping hole like a tear.  Iron framework jutted from the edges of the hole like metal finger bones.  The rails twisted to form a sort of web which led to the darkness inside, a thick and oily sea of shadow. 

Warfield walked ahead with confidence, held up a gloved hand and illuminated the way with a roiling ball of oily yellow light.  Her cloak swirled around her body and her tall boots clacked loud on the floor.  Though no longer a young woman it was easy for Ronan to see why Cross had been infatuated with her for so long.  Warfield practically oozed sex appeal even when she wasn’t doing anything, just a natural beauty and self-assurance that made her desirable.

The arcane torch illuminated the interior of the broken structure.  Most of the walls and floor between the first and second floors had been ripped away, leaving chunks of shattered stone and bent metal, discarded doors and broken glass, rent pipes and open holes where some massive force had clawed its way through the base.  The air was thick with dust motes, and even with Warfield’s torch and the flashlights the darkness felt thick and deep.  Ronan sensed motion just out sight, things in the shadows.  He had one hand gripped on a Norinco Type 56 and the other hovering near the hilt of his katana.

For some reason I thought a backdoor to Bloodhollow would look a little more glorious.

Ronan stepped careful across loose bricks and concrete that had been overgrown with weeds.  Their backs were to the night as they pressed deeper into the gloom.  The two mercs accompanying Abraham took point, crouching low as they pushed forward, their shaved pates sweaty in the thaumaturgic light.  Ronan saw ruined piles of equipment, steam-pipes and loose wires, the clasps from munitions stands, cracked monitors and sputtering junction boxes.