Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Read online

  “You’re smart, Quinn,” Shiv said. “You knew this was an abandoned outpost, and that nothing but zombies had been left here, without so much as a supervising revenant. You also knew no one from Fane or Meldoar or the resistance would come looking for you in this place.” Shiv cocked her head sideways, and smiled. “Except me.”

  “You bitch,” Quinn growled. His inhuman eyes flashed, one of the many parts of his body that had been replaced with vampire technology. His lanky brown hair shifted in the wind, and he moved heel to haunch like some sort of animal. She heard stone crunch in his grip – the gauntlets weren’t just gauntlets but metal appendages, bio-organic limbs powered by steam and magic. Their cold blue metallic glint reminded Shiv of Danica’s bloodsteel appendage. “Luck may have led you to me,” he said, “but it won’t save you.”

  Shiv felt Ruiz and Gyver move up to flank her, but she ushered them back – Quinn was more than a match for either of them, but it was too late. Quinn lurched forward, and Shiv felt his spirit stain the air. That ghost was twisted, broken, a shell of what she’d been – even before she’d been forced to protect her warlock from being detected for days without rest he’d already worn the very fabric of her being thin by subjecting her to cruel experimental manipulations at the hands of the Ebon Kingdoms. Quinn had willingly sold his body to the vampires so he could be augmented, made “more than human” in exchange for vital information they’d use to crush the resistance.

  Cold scaled against Shiv’s skin, and it was all Ruiz could do to raise his own spirit in time to shield her. Soiled soul energy lashed against them in tendrils of ice and grease. His spirit’s whispers sliced through her mind like insane chattering. Shiv saw her, and the image of that emaciated and burned out soul was saddening. Once she’d been powerful, but now she was little more than another pestilent ghost.

  Ruiz shouted out in pain. Quinn’s thaumaturgic augmentations made his spirit powerful, and even with Shiv’s aid the warlock’s shields wouldn’t hold for very long. The air was bitter cold and tasted rancid, and hard driving wind pushed away from the crazed warlock like a sour gale. Shiv felt death in the air. Soul magic had been used to craft Quinn’s metal arms, and the effect those soul-bending enchantments had on his spirit rendered her entirely monstrous, no longer a creature of feeling or thought but a roaming ghast of hatred and remorse, a bitter and empty being whose sole purpose was to punish the living for being what she wasn’t.

  Shiv found the spirit’s core, the dripping tendrils of ectoplasm and spectral veins that dangled like ganglia. They were caustic and slick, difficult to grab without doing some harm to one or the other, but Shiv concentrated, pushed Ruiz’s spirit to its limits (she hated doing that without warning him, for the strain was incredible, and she felt his pain and fear as his body rippled with hurt, but she had no choice) and cleaved her mind to the unstable dimensions of Quinn’s tortured ghost. The Ebon Kingdom’s technology made the effort difficult, for both spirits sparked and folded against her like sheets of bladed iron. Pain lanced down her chest and nausea welled in her stomach.

  Grabbing hold of another’s spirit and manipulating it against their host’s will was a violation, a forceful entry. Shiv held it akin to rape, and hated herself for doing it, hated that it was one of her most powerful abilities.

  She screamed, and tightened her grip on Quinn’s spirit. His biomechanical enhancements made it difficult to grab her cleanly, to achieve any sort of true cohesion that didn’t involve crushing her, or him. The necrotic conduits fought back, charged the air with defensive currents. Blood seeped from Shiv’s nose, but she fought through the pain and dizziness and breathed deep, took hold of that energy and convinced herself it didn’t matter if she hurt the spirit or not.

  Quinn’s eyes bulged as he realized what was happening. His spirit cleaved to his soul, bound there by unnatural bio-genetic wiring. She turned against him, grew suddenly unstable as weylines of arcane energies burned back through the air like streams of fuel put to the flame, and the very safeguards and twisted thaumaturgy that had made it so he could manipulate and twist his spirit were the very thing that prevented him from being able to pull away. She was bonded to him, a companion made his prisoner, a soul mate made his slave.

  Shiv burned those energies and scorched the spirit’s being until she was nothing more than a mindless shred of what she’d been. Quinn had no escape. His screams echoed through the burned structure. The warlock’s skin blistered black and peeled away from his bones, exposing oozing hot muscle and scorched blood.

  Within moments Quinn was quiet, and he lay there on the ground, a grotesque and smoking shell. His skin was charred, and his leather armor was fused to what was left of his body. His hair had burned away, his eyes popped, and his corpse was surrounded by a grim haze of vile smoke.

  Ruiz and Gyver coughed and backed away, sickened by the sight. He’d been burned to death in an instant, hours of agony squeezed into seconds.

  I hope it hurt, Shiv thought.

  She reached out and caught hold of Quinn’s soul – not his arcane spirit, which had vanished along with the smoke and steam, but his own, the specter of his former life, all that was left of his living consciousness. It was weak and afraid, so tortured and battered by the man’s experiences it had little left to defend itself.

  He’d been a traitor, a warlock of the White Children fighting against the Ebon Kingdom’s control over the New Fang territories, but he’d decided to go to the other side and betray secrets about the human’s secret hideouts and supply depots, information that even Fane and Meldoar had been unable to uncover in their off-and-on alliances and rivalries with both the Children and with each other.

  All of that knowledge poured into Shiv as she gripped and dominated what was left of the spirit, all of the schematics and maps and dates. The vampires had acted on it all quickly – the White Children hadn’t even had time to evacuate their safe houses or change plans that had already been set in motion.

  Nothing she saw surprised her – Shiv knew much of what Quinn had told them, so none of the secrets he’d revealed came as much of a shock. But there was something else she sought, something else she needed. While a turncoat like Quinn never would have been privy to any of the vampire’s darker secrets, when he’d been operated on and debriefed she’d hoped it was possible he’d glimpsed some details of his surroundings that might complete a cycle of information Shiv had already been hard at work deciphering.

  She saw the operation, as necrotheurges and zombie doctors pulled the flesh from his arms and grafting on the animated and smoking steel; she saw him in a dark cold room, nodes attached to his skull, information pouring from his brain like white-gold honey; she saw him present as the vampires assaulted a cargo train of resistance supplies, saw as it was torn apart by Razorwings and revenants, listened as humans screamed and perished while he just stood there, pitying himself for being so weak, shaken by remorse but in too deep to turn back; she saw the wolf, the shadow, the Maloj, hunted and hounded by the vampires, always escaping their grip, just a step ahead as it hunted for something only it knew about. She’d killed one, the vampires another: there was only one left. The leader.

  And then she saw what she needed. The message.

  It had been meant for Quinn’s controllers, a brief snippet of information, a schematic relay on some console he’d seen but not comprehended, only he did understand without knowing it, for by hard-wiring him to vampire tech the undead had inadvertently made it so his bio-organically altered subconscious could analyze those encoded frequencies, the High Jlantrian script that to human eyes read like random flashes of bladed pyramids and razor eyes.

  Shiv glimpsed the message in the memory of Quinn’s dying spirit and her heart pounded, because it meant maybe there was still hope.

  Maps and coordinates flashed: the location of the last bastion, the place where the Lith had predicted the final stand would take place. Shiv captured those images, burned them into her mind so she could compare them wi
th information she’d already gathered. Once she confirmed the coordinates they could proceed, and within a few hours they could be on their way to Bloodhollow, the place where it all began.

  The place where they could end the war.

  Things were in motion. By her estimation the message had appeared just a day ago, when Quinn was still in the Ebon Kingom’s hands.

  There was still time. The vampires were moving on Bloodhollow, but Shiv and the resistance would find it first.

  FIVE

  VICTIMS

  Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

  They brought him in. Pain seared across the soft portions of his flesh.

  He’d been through this before, this fugue of hurting and being hurt, of being marched out, barely coherent, to fight enemies greater than himself. That had been in Krul, when he’d been a gladiator, battling for the amusement of the vampire aristocracy. Now he was in a different hell, woken at odd hours, sent out to slay the dying before they became something worse.

  Anticipating blacking out, Cross suspended all other thought. They dropped him onto his bed. He blinked at the ceiling, cold concrete laced with cracks that spread like a dismal constellation. Everything started to spin.

  He tasted death in the air. He’d been there for barely ten days, but already it felt like years. Blood and ash and smoke, wading through ankle-deep remains. Tasting every soul as it was released, watching recognition blossom on people’s faces as he ran them through with his blade. He was exhausted, having spent hours wading through the remains of the almost dead, hewing through blistered flesh and praying that what he did for them was something good, but he doubted it.

  They’d brought him there for some other purpose, though sometimes it was difficult for him to remember what it was.

  The swords. They need the swords.

  Were they testing him? Did this grisly clean-up duty have something to do with the Raza’s analysis of the artifacts, or was it just for their amusement? Another way of hurting him, when they’d already taken everything he had.

  No. That’s not true. Not yet.

  Because she was still alive.

  He healed as he rested, but it was a painful process. The blades weren’t gentle, and as he laid on that uncomfortable cot in the small and dingy room – a room that reminded him far too much of the hovel he’d owned back in Thornn, in a time when his sister was still alive and his spirit was his own, when Graves was always at his side and he was too young to understand how much pain awaited him – his wounds cracked together, blood cleansed, skin forcefully closed, the filth in his lungs expunged as if by a bilge pump.

  The world faded. He lost time.

  He’d expected to be sent to Fane; instead, he’d wound up Night, a small and creaky city-state at the edge of the Ebonsand Sea, a place once known as a haven for wastelands refugees yet still possessed of a strong sense of order. Sailors, nomads, farmers, traders and criminals all called the place home. The buildings were tall and irregular and the citizens possessed a somewhat dismal state of mind, but at least the city was relatively safe. A council of ex-soldiers allowed people to do what they wished, provided they followed a few simple provisos of law in order to minimize bloodshed. The harbor was full day and night with ramshackle ships, shanties, iron-clad war boats and converted yachts retrofitted with armor and rotary guns, and the streets overlooking the black-gold waters were lined with merchants, booksellers, even a garden. The place was dank and smelly and always green, as if the sky had been flushed with algae, and the people were unkempt and rough, set in their ways and isolated.

  That was how Cross recalled Night, from the few times he and the team had passed through the remote city-state on away missions for the Southern Claw. Everything had changed under Wulf’s rule. The city had fallen quickly, he was told, and it had been transformed into another outpost for the so-called East Claw Coalition’s continued campaign of conquest. The air seemed darker than when Cross had been there last, and the people’s eyes were filled with fear. The council had been executed on the steps of the small manor they used as a government building, and just in case anyone had any doubts as to Wulf’s authority his Raza swept through and eliminated every mage in the city.

  The world was already mad before he and Danica had been exiled to Nezzek’duul – now it was completely insane.

  Cross tried to drown out the sounds of battle raging outside; the fighting never seemed to stop, day or night. He comforted himself with thoughts of Danica, her hair, her eyes, the warmth between them as they lay there, tangled together, safe from the world.

  Every night he tried to dream of her, but rarely did. Instead he dreamed of what he was forced to do during the day: navigating mounds of dying people and finishing them with the blade.

  I am the swords, and they are me.

  Soulrazor. Avenger. A man who bore such weapons was not meant to lead a peaceful existence. Agony lie buried within their folded steel. For a time he’d thought Soulrazor had made it so he’d somehow caused The Black, and that his time-trapped self had been the source of that rip, but he no longer believed that.

  I’m just a man, trapped by hurt.

  He opened his eyes. The ceiling was still there, and for a moment the world was still, but after he looked around the dim and cluttered chamber a blast of fire tore through the air outside, quickly followed by screams and the sound of klaxons.

  They’d come for him soon. Cross lay there, breathing deep. Memories of battles floated in his head. There was no order to them, no way to be sure when they’d happened. Sometimes his friends were present; in most he was alone.

  Like I’m meant to be.

  Cross watched as the survivors were wiped out. The screams of the dying filled his head. He wanted more than anything for it to stop, for that horrid morning to be over, but he knew it was just getting started.

  The battle had been going on for days. Ebon Cities forces had converged on Night and staged a concentrated attack which had demolished the north gates and turned the once verdant fields to ruin. Wulf had ordered all units to hang back and hold fire until the Razorwings and Bloodcrests were well within the walls, where their aerial maneuverability was all but negated. It didn’t matter to Wulf or his men that civilian casualties would be enormous – he rarely worried about collateral damage, and the Hammer and Fist, the mercantile leaders of Fane, had believed that was what made him such an efficient military leader. The fact that the Hammer and Fist no longer existed and Wulf now controlled the united East Claw Coalition was a bit of irony they weren’t around to enjoy.

  The ground just inside the northern walls was a smoking waste. Buildings had been flattened and splintered, reduced to burning piles of matchstick and coal. The gate had been ripped away by explosive pressure, a jagged scar in the rounded dark stone, and its sheared edges still rippled with pale energies like streams of milky water. Steam curled thick in the atmosphere and glowed in the light of the setting sun.

  Cross wrapped his cowl around his face. There was no moisture in the bitterly cold air, and the body and wreckage strewn across the ground were as dry as salt. The fires had gone out, but the stench of burning remained.

  The woman stared up at him, horrified. Already the change was taking her – her flesh was turning black from the inside out as her necrotized veins slithered beneath the surface of her skin. Her eyes were slowly shriveling with a dry sucking sound, and as she clawed at his leg Cross realized she didn’t really see who or what it was: he was just meat. She wasn’t dead yet, not quite, but it would be soon.

  You’re doing her a mercy, he thought, but that didn’t make him feel any better about the fact that he was about to run an innocent young woman through with a sword. Gunshots rang out not far away – Korver or Green or one of the other mercenaries were using hexed bullets to finish off the victims in their kill zones, but Cross was told to use Soulrazor/Avenger. How else could the Raza uncover all of its secrets if they couldn’t watch him use it?

  The twin blade slid fro
m the sheath. A hand-and-a-half sword, oddly balanced with a heavy tip where the black and white sections had fused, the weapon was the source of his strength, as well as his pain. At times it would protect him from any harm or help his body regenerate from wounds that would have killed almost any other man. It drove him, propelled him towards something it wanted, though its ultimate aim and purpose remained oblique. The weapon was familiar in his hand by now, almost comfortable. Without it he was just an ordinary man, a former warlock whose spirit had been stripped away not once but twice, an aging veteran of dozens of battles who’d been to hell and back, who’d survived the necropolis of Koth and the distant lands of Nezzek’duul, a mercenary whose team dealt with some of the most difficult missions ever thrown at any unit over the course of the war.

  Only now that war was over. The Southern Claw lost. And a new war had begun.

  Cross sent the blade through her chest quickly, trying not to look into her inhuman eyes. The Necro virus that the Ebon Cities loaded their munitions with was horrifying, much worse than anything he’d ever seen them use in the timeline he knew. Based on what he’d been told the war engineers of Fane were no closer to uncovering a serum now than they had been two weeks ago when word of the weapon had started to spread, and while arcane shielding seemed to help keep the disease at bay it was impossible to use as much magic as was needed on a wide enough scale to completely protect everyone. Luckily it seemed the Ebon Cities had only a limited supply of the toxin, which turned those exposed into undead themselves, zombies with a drive to consume the flesh of humans nearby.