Blood Skies (blood skies) Read online

  “ Did they see anything?” Cross asked.

  “ We’d have known by now if they had.”

  The outer ring of the forest was an unstable saltwater marsh. Brackish water littered with floating deposits of calcium and rust turned the flow to a half-frozen sludge that streamed around thick weeds, thorny brambles and drifts of dark silt. The forest loomed behind them as they returned to camp. Ancient and gnarled trees, some a hundred feet high, twisted and bent together in an obscene dance. A semi-translucent fog surrounded the forest. Bits of dead organic matter flitted in the breeze like flies. The Wormwood stretched for miles — Cross couldn’t make out its boundaries from their vantage, and due to the height of the trees it was difficult to see the breadth of the twisted forest from there on the ground. The land around the Wormwood was nearly as lifeless as the forest itself, though not nearly so cursed. There were cold plains, empty riverbeds, frozen streams of black and green water, and steep bluffs that overlooked oceans of red and grey sand. They were right at the southern tip of the Bone March, an amply named waste filled with drifts of white dust, ancient bones of ancient beasts, great fields of discarded finger bones and skulls piled high, and other monuments to the destruction wrought by The Black. The air tasted dead and cold.

  The camp was in a dry streambed just out of sight from the plain. Winter was already there, and he, Snow and Kray had disassembled the camp and now looked ready for trouble. Cross’ stomach churned. No matter how many battles he’d lived through, the thought of willingly walking into a situation where he could die still seemed idiotic to him. He’d taken part in over a dozen missions with Viper Squad, and he’d seen more than his share of action before that when he was part of Wolf Company, defending Thornn from blood wolves and Gorgoloth. He’d faced vampires and the animated shadows of their victims in Blackmarsh. He’d seen people die, and he’d been covered in his friend’s remains.

  Does this ever get any easier?

  Cross knew that most of his anxiety stemmed from Snow’s presence. She was the only member of the Squad with less experience than himself, and whether or not anyone liked it one of Cross’ constant duties had become taking care of her. And while Cross was fully aware of his own worries, he could only imagine what was going through her mind. He had to give her credit: if she had any fear, she didn’t show it. The teenage girl that used to be his baby sister looked like a warrior now. There were draconic tattoos on her neck and all over her arms, and she wore a thick armored coat that covered the knives she kept strapped to her wrists. She calmly adjusted her leather gauntlets. Her eyes were calm.

  I still see the younger Snow. I still see you with that floppy elephant doll, reading books all day in your room. You’ll always be that young to me.

  Kray and Winter, the old veterans, looked even more at ease. When Kray, who had a giant’s presence even when he stayed in the background, yielded that mini-gun Cross was sure there were fewer living beings more frightening to behold. Graves hinted that Kray might have been half-Doj, but no one in the squad dared ask.

  Cross and Winter hurriedly packed the rest of the gear into their packs. Graves checked and loaded his shotgun, and after a quick check of the camp they silently trekked back up the hill and into the trees.

  Cross surveyed the forest again when they’d returned to where they’d carried out their reconnaissance, and saw that the vampires were still there. They hadn’t moved.

  “ They know we’re here,” Graves said quietly. “Spread out. Morg and Stone are going to meet us in the forest.”

  The air turned sour as they stepped into the trees and fanned out in a broken line. They moved with near silence in spite of the marsh water and dismal forest sludge that ate up their feet. The canopy of trees was so thick it was as if they’d walked into perpetual midnight. The mud sucked at their boots and spindly tree limbs grabbed their clothing. Viscous gases and gouts of gray slime erupted out of the ankle-deep water. Cross saw the vaguest semblance of faces staring up at him from inside the water, the ancient bones of a buried age.

  Cross had his HK in his non-shooting hand, while his right was clenched with arcane energy. His spirit twisted and crawled across his skin like a rippling liquid suit. The condensation was thick in the air, and it tasted like honey left too long in the sun.

  They closed in on the clearing. Graves and Cross moved down the middle of their formation, Kray on the left flank and Winter on the right. Snow floated just above the ground. Her spirit held her aloft as she attuned her senses to the folds between the material world, the shadows and the creases through which arcane energies flowed. Her eyes were dead white as she floated along, seemingly unconscious, and her hands trailed behind her.

  She was their tracker, and she would find what they searched for.

  They went deeper. The air was thick with buzzing insects that could drain all of the blood from a human body given the time, and the taste of rot in the air was as thick as porridge. White effluvia floated in the water, and Cross glimpsed shadows all around them, moving through the trees. His arm grew numb from holding his spirit at the ready for so long, but he didn’t dare let her go. It was so hard to keep her in check, so physically draining to keep her harnessed and complacent, that he feared if he relaxed it might take too long to make her ready her again if trouble arose, and by then it would be too late.

  The clearing where the vampires had stood — a dry island amidst the ankle-deep mire — was directly ahead. Twisted trees with half-white roots where the Wormwood had sucked their life and vitality away stood at odd angles on the mound, tangled together like strings. Only Graves fully stepped onto the island, while the rest of them gave it fair berth, their eyes on the trees. Cross couldn’t see more than a few feet into the thick of the Wormwood. It was as if spider webs made of black silk had been strung across the path in every direction. Light simply refused to penetrate those deeper folds of the impossibly dense and gnarled forest.

  Graves stood on the mound of land with his Remington 870 sawed-off shotgun at the ready. Cross watched Graves and tried to read the air, but the arcane energies were so dense it was like trying to look straight into the sun. Buzzing insects filled the air in spite of how unseasonably cold it felt.

  Cross looked up at Snow, who quietly nodded towards the trees. After a moment’s hesitation, Cross nodded, too. He sensed nothing waiting there for them, but they both knew that could have been interference from the black energies of the forest, which proved adept at confounding their magical senses.

  Graves carried on, and moved deeper still into the trees.

  A sharp crack cut through the air. Cross heard a sick splash, like a sack filled with something wet had been opened and spilled.

  Winter fell to the ground, blood pouring from an open cavity in his skull.

  Razor projectiles came at them with deadly accuracy. Cross crafted a shield of air in front of him and barely deflected bone needles intended for he and Snow. They both dropped to the ground.

  Graves was down. Cross saw a nine-inch bone nail lodged in his friend’s left arm, glistening with blood. Shots rang through the trees. Cross fired into the darkness, a distraction while he held the shield and pulled in more of his spirit, focused her raw form into his fist and held her there, crackling, a dissolving ball of corrosive cold that dripped like oil between his fingers.

  “ Graves?!” he called out.

  “ I’m okay,” he grunted.

  “ I think Winter is dead,” Cross said quietly.

  He felt Snow’s vision as she scanned the trees for the vampires, as she reached out with keen senses and probed the limbs and clearings and watery pockets, the open holes in the dense thicket, searching for what wasn’t there. Vampires gave off an entirely different energy signature than a living being: they bore no souls, but they could be located through that absence, by the void silhouette they left behind them as they moved through the world. It was doubly difficult for her to find them right then, of course, thanks to the barrage of bone needles bein
g launched at them from the darkness of the forest.

  “ Down!” Cross shouted. He focused his thoughts and breathed icy vapors into his sweaty palm. He lobbed the cold grenade into the trees, guiding it as best he could through the will of his spirit. The explosion shook the ground and sent out a wave of deathly ice that even from a hundred yards away licked against them with a chill arctic wind.

  The shooting stopped. Cross looked up. Dozens of bone needles stuck out of the trees like quills, and they dripped cold white fluid from the tips of their spines.

  “ Damn,” Graves said. Cross moved over to him, staying low. He clamped his gauntlet around Graves’ arm and channeled raw magic into him, hoping to quickly burn out whatever poison or narcotic the needles had been coated with before anything spread through Graves’ bloodstream. Cross felt a nervous sensation along the back of his neck, like something was about to reach out and grab him from behind.

  A rifle shot and a dull explosion sounded in the distance. Moments later, Cross saw a cloud of white and yellow smoke deep in the shadowy murk.

  “ There they are,” Graves said. His breaths were shallow, but Cross hoped it was the sudden flux of arcane energies being poured into him, rather than his body reacting to poison.

  Cross remembered getting stung by a pair of wasps one after the other when he’d been a boy, only those wasps had been tainted by the energies of the Bone March. Drogan, an old warlock shaman, had spent days trying to heal him. Cross remembered Drogan’s grim and hollow eyes and the smell of ghosts on his breath.

  That was the day I learned I was a warlock.

  “ Snow, are you okay?” Cross called out. He felt the touch of her mind, the will of the spirit that circled around her like a controlled whirlwind. Snow lay on her chest, her head tucked under her arms, as if waiting for something to fall on her. She still focused on scanning the area ahead. “Snow!?”

  “ I’m fine,” she replied.

  “ Kray?”

  “ Yeah.” The big man lumbered into view. Kray hadn’t had time to pull out the mini-gun, so he instead had his sword drawn, a heavy black-bladed saber with a cord set in the hilt and white gashes carved into the blade to display Kray’s number of kills. Cross never understood that practice: he thought keeping tally of how many things you destroyed was just asking for trouble. “I thought there was something moving there in the trees, but it never got closer than fifty yards.” With Kray being such an enormous man, for some reason Cross used to assume that also meant he was stupid. Far from it, Kray probably possessed the best tactical mind in the Squad besides Morg.

  “ Can you check Winter?” Cross asked him.

  “ Am I going to live, or what?” Graves snapped at him. Cross felt how clammy Graves’ arm was even through the leather and cloth of his shirt. “Morg and Stone are out there alone, for God’s sake, and we need to get to them.”

  “ Winter is gone,” Kray said from the trees. “Not sure what hit him. Some kind of projectile took him in the head.”

  “ Crap,” Cross sighed. His stomach went sour. He’d known Winter for a good, long time. They weren’t close friends, by any means, but they’d served together for some time, and knowing somebody for that long, being around them and being used to seeing them every day, depending on them, learning from them, talking about things that others couldn’t understand, and now he was gone…

  Not now, his own voice told him. You don’t have time for this.

  Snow sat up.

  “ I’m sorry,” she said. She’d known Winter for a long time, as well, but not as long as Cross had.

  “ Kray,” Cross said, “can you get his gear?”

  “ Cross?” Graves demanded. “Am I dying or not?”

  “ You should be fine,” Cross said, and he unhanded Graves’ arm and drew his spirit back into an orbit about him. She circled him uneasily, like a murder of ethereal crows.

  “ Then let’s go,” Graves said, and without another word he rose, reloaded the shotgun, and set off into the trees. Kray followed, hacking noxious tree limbs out of his path with his oversized blade. He dropped Winter’s belt pouch in front of Cross.

  Cross felt a shudder in the air, and his spirit bristled. Winter’s spirit had moved on, no longer tied to the physical world now that its mortal tether had been removed.

  Snow came and stood next to him.

  “ I found Morg and Stone, and I think I found the vampires,” she said. Cross looked at her. She was only barely holding herself together. Her lip trembled, and only the thick shadows and grime on her face hid the tears in her eyes. Cross wondered if he looked as scared as she did.

  “ Let’s go, then,” he said. He took the pouch, stuffed it into his coat and stood up. “They may be in trouble.”

  “ Are you all right?” she asked, moving in his way as he made to go. Cross watched her for a moment.

  What the hell are you doing here? he wondered. What am I doing here? He still couldn’t look at Snow without seeing a little girl. He couldn’t look at her without seeing his baby sister, and all he wanted to do was get her out of there, to get her away from that vile place as fast as they could…but no. No. This is where we are. This is where we need to be.

  “ I’m fine,” he said, knowing she could see the lie on his face. You have to lie, he wanted to tell her. You have to lie to yourself, tell yourself everything is fine, tell yourself that you don’t care. If you don’t, you won’t last a day, and that’s why I have to lie to you now, even though you know I’m doing it. “Let’s go,” was all he said aloud, and they went deeper into the trees, towards the black noise that waited for them there.

  I am not afraid, he told himself, hoping that if he repeated it enough he’d eventually believe it. I am not afraid.

  EIGHT

  CRYPT

  It didn’t take them long to find Morg and Stone.

  Cross’ frost grenade left behind a flat and icy clearing. The marsh water was covered in a film of ice, and most of the dangling tree limbs had fallen away like oversized icicles. Chunks of partially frozen meat and bits of red armor and cloth lay on the ground around the gore-spattered remains of a pale-skinned vampire torso.

  “ Nice shot,” Graves said quietly.

  “ Lucky shot,” Cross corrected.

  “ Yes, lucky shot,” Morg said out of nowhere. His voice made both Cross and Snow jump. Morg held a M4A2, as did Stone. Stone was the second-in-command of the squad. He was just as tall as Morg but much more skinny, with thick hair and a short beard. Both of their black fatigues and armor jackets were stained with forest slime. Their boots were covered in mud, and Cross noticed that Stone’s left hand had some gashes on the knuckles.

  “ Are you all right?” he asked, and Stone nodded.

  “ Yeah. Did we sneak up on you?”

  “ You snuck up on them,” Graves said with a nod toward the mages.

  “ Winter?” Morg asked quietly. Graves shook his head, and Morg nodded. “Any other trouble?”

  “ Just the Shadowclaws. Snow is tracking them now.”

  “ Don’t bother, we know where they are,” Morg said. His baritone voice felt unnaturally loud in the still air. “There’s a structure half a klick to the west. The suck-heads went that way.”

  “ How many?” Graves asked. Kray helped him bandage his wound now that Cross had leeched away the poison. Graves didn’t seem too bothered by the fact that a needle had pushed all of the way through his arm.

  “ Two Creeds,” Stone said.

  “ Wow,” Graves said with a shake of his head. Cross smelled Graves’ strange and sharp-flavored organic chewing tobacco. He wished he had a cigarillo.

  “ We may not be properly equipped to deal with that many vampires,” Cross said, and while Kray nodded and Snow’s eyes grew wide, he got the response he expected from the others.

  “ Are you scared?” Stone smiled. Morgan and Graves just laughed, and started towards the structure.

  The Wormwood was a graveyard. Long moldering tree limbs sank int
o the thick black churn like languid serpents, piles of bones lay in drifts of dark silt and creamy mud, and stones and bricks and dead leaves lay scattered like casualties. The squad saw corner block foundations of old buildings covered with moss, weeds and slime. Vines crept out of the dismal waters. Statues, street signs and mailboxes stood half-out of the mud. Cross saw the remains of a car covered in fungus and overgrowth, and bits of a street that had been swallowed up by the forest. The entire Wormwood smelled like an old garbage can or the inside of a stomach. Churning acid, bad eggs and stale milk all combined to form a bitter and gagging cloud of largely invisible vapors.

  The silence was unnerving. Cross didn’t hear so much as a mosquito. There was nothing alive in the Wormwood — nothing natural, at least — and all they heard as they slowly trudged through the murk was the sound of their own boots as they sank and pulled out of the briny black sewage.

  Snow floated just above the ground. Morg, Stone, Graves and Kray walked a defensive perimeter around her and Cross. Cross initially objected, but Morg insisted both mages stay protected, especially since Cross was now the lone warlock in the party. Guns and alchemy bombs would carry them for a while, but without arcane spirits on their side humans wouldn’t have lasted more than a year or two against the vampires, and less than that against more powerful enemies like the Cruj or the Sorn. Cross’ stomach was going haywire. He’d been in areas and situations like this before — the worst had been the catacombs beneath Glaive — but the stakes had never been this high.

  And you’ve never had to worry about whether or not your sister was going to make it out alive.