Blood Skies Read online

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

  Cross had once met the woman they now hunted, face to face. Red, they called her, but her real name was Margrave Azazeth. She’d been a hero, one of the most powerful witches who ever lived, and after she’d achieved a role of leadership she’d helped to lead humankind into a new age, an age of survival. She’d been the voice of the White Mother, and the champion of Thornn and the Southern Claw.

  And now, she’s turned on us. She’s stolen something, something vital, and we have to stop her from giving it to the Old One.

  And so there they were, ankle-deep in sludge, their senior member dead, and all of them intent on killing a woman who not long before had been considered one of the best and brightest of the Southern Claw. Cross thought back to his youth – he’d been doing that a lot lately, in spite of himself – and he remembered chasing after his mother after she’d run away, when she’d been unable to deal with the reality that her son had supernatural powers. Snow had been an infant then, not old enough to understand why mommy had lost her mind, or how she and her big brother would be treated like dangerous animals for the rest of their lives. He wasn’t sure why he thought about that now.

  “There,” Stone said quietly. He was soft spoken for such a tall man. The squad moved carefully, but they were fast and quiet, and they carried themselves with the precision of hunter cats.

  I’m not one of them, Cross thought. I’m not a soldier. I’m just a weapon. All of us are, me and Snow both, and Winter, and Chalmers, and all of the witches and warlocks. They’re afraid of us. I’m afraid of us.

  Stone pointed out a well camouflaged stone structure that Cross would have looked right past if it hadn’t been shown to him. The stone building was covered with so much moss it looked like a massive tree stump. Cross thought it might have once stood taller and been some sort of obelisk or pillar, but the upper sections had long since toppled into the swamp. The ruin stood on the shore of a small island that was maybe forty feet across. The island, in turn, stood in the center of a shallow and murky lake. Twisted branches and bubbles of oil and grease floated along the surface of the water.

  Bits of stone were visible through the moss, sections of a fallen monolith covered with images of angels and eyes. A twisted metal gate had been ripped from the main door, and as they drew close Cross realized that the structure was the partially crushed remains of a mausoleum. A film of dark slime rendered the crypt nearly invisible, and the roof had partially collapsed. There was no sign of what might have crushed the structure, but Cross got the eerie impression that something massive had stepped on it.

  “Yes,” Snow confirmed quietly. Her voice took on a hollow quality. It wasn’t really her, but her spirit as it spoke through her, using her as a medium, even though Snow was the one really in control. She used her spirit to analyze the dweomer lines and to read between the reality folds as she searched for the absence, the void that would tell them that undead were there. Her finger reached, outstretched, towards the building.

  “The suck-heads are there?” Kray asked grimly.

  “We saw them head toward it,” Stone said. He slung his rifle over his back and procured a 9mm Beretta with dragons carved into the hilt.

  “What about her?” Cross asked. He and Stone both looked back at Snow.

  “What about Red?” Graves repeated.

  Snow hovered in place. Cross found the effect of his sister levitating mere inches above the face of the marsh unnerving. Only witches could do that, and only those blessed with the ability to read the lines of shadow and ether, which somehow snaked their smoky tendrils out of the shadow world to lift a witch aloft. She floated there, her head held back, her back arched, her eyes blank and staring not at the physical world but at some striated arcane patterns and whorls that only she could see. She was ominous and aimless in the cold embrace of her spirit. In that state, she saw only what her spirit showed her, or chose to show her. That was a notion that was very frightening to apprentice mages — that their spirit might actually be in control, and that a witch or a warlock was at their mercy.

  Snow was lost in concentration. Everyone rechecked their weapons and looked ready to move on, regardless of what Snow had to say, when at last she spoke.

  “Yes. Oh my God, yes, she’s there, I can sense her!”

  “Move,” Morg said, and without another word they converged on the mausoleum.

  The squad was forced to move slow through the murky water, and soon they were waist deep in warm slime and effluvia. Cross got a good view into the structure as they drew near, but what he saw was only a foyer. There was a broken staircase made of ancient and crumbling stone that was just barely visible through the gaps in the collapsing outer shell of the structure. Cross’ blood went cold at the thought of where those stairs might lead.

  “How did something like that even get here?” Graves grumbled quietly.

  “It was here before the forest was, genius,” Kray growled, his sword at the ready. He was the soldier closest to Snow, and Cross knew he’d take protect her with his life. Truth be told, Cross figured Kray was a better choice to protect her than he was. “The forest came later. It buried whatever was here before. Everyone knows that.”

  “Wow, Kray knew something I didn’t,” Graves smiled. “That officially makes me the dumbest man on the planet…”

  “Yes, it does,” Morg growled, with a tone that made his mood clear. “Keep talking, and we’re all dead.” The look he shot Graves would have sent a lot of people running. Morg glowered at them all for a moment, then took up his spear and carried on.

  Cross was close to Graves, and whispered.

  “Kray’s wrong. It came later.”

  “What?”

  “‘What’ what?”

  “‘What what’, as in ‘what the hell are you talking about’?’” Graves hissed.

  “The crypt, moron,” Cross laughed. “Things shifted when The Black came. This crypt was probably somewhere else, and it transported here when everything went crazy.”

  “Why? Just…randomly?”

  “Maybe. Sometimes it was random. Sometimes it wasn’t. The Black was sentient…it had reasons for some of the things it did. It had a purpose.”

  They were nearly to the crypt. Cross fell back to survey the area ahead with his readied spirit. Edged whispers and muffled static moans echoed in the back of his mind, and the skin on his arms and neck bristled at the touch of the electric cold. Snow was the one capable of following the lines of life or death to track their prey, but Cross would be the first to know if there was anything magical waiting for them in the immediate area, whether it was a weapon or some sort of trap. He walked on edge through dank waters that soaked his heavy boots. Cross didn’t want to think about what sort of filth floated in the warm and briny fluids.

  Snow floated behind Cross and Kray took up the rear, where he watched for any sign of trouble from behind. Up front, Morg and Stone entered the crypt, confident that Cross would warn them of danger, while Graves stayed at the middle and kept everyone in sight. Cross’s skin was icy with anticipation.

  He finally came to dry land, which was soft and thick with mud and collapsing soil. The earth was black, and it seemed to have once been part of a larger mass that had been swallowed up by the swamp and the Wormwood. A lair of smooth black stones was just underneath the surface of the soil. Ancient bones, cracked with age, lay nestled between the rocks. The land sloped steeply upwards, but the ground grew more solid as it rose towards the apex of the hill where the mausoleum waited, slumped and sinking into dark ground. There seemed to be a black cloud just inside the crypt. Shadows oozed and leaked from the stone like dark steam.

  Cross felt something as it pulled at his thoughts, a hint of danger that swirled around his mind like a nagging fly. He looked around – everything was spinning, like he’d been thrown into the center of an out-of-control merry-go-round – and the whispers, which were normall
y so subtle and distant, filled his head with such force that they clouded his eyes and made his gums ache.

  He glanced back at Snow. Her eyes were solid white because she was using her magic, but they suddenly went wide with shock. Kray seemed to notice something wrong, as well, and he spun and looked at the line of trees and the deeper waters of the murky lake, which seemed suddenly bigger and deeper than it had just moments before.

  “Ambush!” Cross yelled, but not in time. Shadows erupted out of the water and the trees.

  Horrid figures came at them, all ebon flesh and wild hair, leathery bodies covered in pores and cracks. Stark white eyes and claws shone in the dim light, and long serpentine tongues lapped against razor fangs. White veins bulged from dark skin, leaking phosphorescent goo.

  They weren’t vampires, but Chul, denizens of the Wormwood, corrupted souls made into shadowy and murderous zombies.

  Smoking claws lashed out at Snow, but Kray leapt in the way and pushed her floating body onto the isle. With a single stroke of his blade he decapitated a Chul, splattering black blood everywhere.

  Cries cut through the trees in a unified squelch of skin and sound, a high-pitched animal call like a chorus of metal. Cross saw at least a dozen Chul emerge from the darkness. His spirit, whom he’d held at the edge of his thoughts, coalesced into a mass of electric liquid that swam across his arms and fingertips, and with a fluid motion he released her. Daggers of ice-blue light exploded out of his hands like chill meteors. Tendrils of frost laced his fingers and burned the flesh beneath his smoking gauntlets. Orbs of electric cold burrowed their way into zombie bodies, perforated them with razor shards of ice and filled them with gouts of cold blue flame. Black torsos exploded into chunks of dripping matter.

  Snow screamed, fell onto her back and crawled away from the carnage. Cross could barely catch his breath. His spirit still held him as if impassioned, and she was stuck to his skin like lover’s sweat. Cross had hit nearly every Chul in sight with his arcane bullets, but some of them still pushed forward, their bodies dissolving from the inside out as icy energy spread through their unnatural forms. The smell of entrails was thick in the air. Kray hacked falling creatures apart as he backed onto the shore. Gunfire from behind them blasted an uninjured Chul, spattering its misshapen skull.

  Cross grabbed Snow by the arm and pulled her to her feet. Graves, Stone and Morg rained bullets on the Chul and mowed the unstable ebon bodies down beneath a ruthless barrage of gunfire. Smoke and ear-shattering noise filled the air. Cross kept his spirit at hand, and didn’t release in spite of her unspoken pleas. He held onto Snow’s arms.

  The shooting, at last, stopped, and the Wormwood was silent once again. Oozing bodies sagged and deflated in the water and on the edge of the shore, and black ichors poured out of the punctured sacks of meat. Fumes rose out of the dead and mingled with the other poisons of the forest.

  “So much for surprising anyone,” Graves cursed as he reloaded his Remington.

  Cross quickly checked Kray, and after he confirmed that the big man was uninjured both Morg and Stone returned to the mausoleum, their eyes on the stairs.

  “There’s no way they didn’t hear that,” Stone said quietly.

  “They already know we’re here, anyhow,” Morg said softly. He took a cloth out of his pocket and cleaned off the tip of his spear, a serrated silver blade with runic carvings of elfin maidens armed with swords. Morg stripped down to a flak vest, which left his arms bare and displayed the intricate serpentine tattoos on his dark and rippled muscles. He wore a silver and iron band on his right wrist and a strip of Kevlar and steel armor around his left elbow. Cross knew that he lived for this, the fighting, the struggle. He’d been a gladiator once, they said, forced to fight for the amusement of the vampire aristocracy in the city-state of Krul. “Are you ready?”

  It took Cross a moment to realize Morg was talking to he and Snow. Cross hesitated. He was shaken from keeping his spirit on edge for so long (she was still there, poised, hovering around him like a deadly and erotic pet). The stress of having just detonated explosive ice bombs inside a dozen zombies had both he and his spirit coiled and tense. Snow’s eyes, in the meantime, were wide with shock, and Cross sensed the anxious emanations of her spirit, confused by what it saw and felt. The spirit was bonded to the soul – one reflected the other. What one felt, the other felt. If one suffered, the other suffered.

  You’re too young, Cross wanted to tell her. You have to leave. You don’t belong here.

  Snow nodded and offered a stoic: “I’m ready”. Cross glanced sideways at her for a moment, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She hadn’t wiped away the black blood that landed on her from the exploding Chul bodies. The tattoos on her neck dully pulsed with power, the foci for her harnessed spirit.

  No one else seemed to notice the depth of her apprehension; if they did, no one chose to say anything about it. Cross rose, hesitantly, and helped her to her feet.

  They moved down the steep steps and into the moldy darkness of the crypt. Dank weeds and dark, twisted roots covered with black soil hung across the narrow hole of an entrance, which descended straight down into near darkness. The steps were smooth and shallow, wide but unstable. The air smelled of mildew and age, and they had to light Kray’s lamp to see.

  Stone was the first to descend, his M4 in hand, followed tightly by each of them in a single file line. Kray brought up the rear; he was barely able to squeeze down the cramped opening. Dirt and soil fell in occasional drifts from between solid blocks of aged and crumbling stone. The cramped quarters reminded Cross again of his childhood, of crawling around in the air ducts of old buildings, dodging vampires and waiting for help.

  Why do I keep thinking about my childhood? Keep your head straight, Eric, or it’s going to get torn off.

  Cross wasn’t sure how far they’d gone until they hit the bottom, when his feet awkwardly found solid ground. Kray’s lamp illuminated the area in front of them, and it all but negated any chance of their gaining surprise. Still, Cross reasoned, it was better than falling down the shaft. He turned and helped Snow down the last step by taking her waif-like waist in his hands. (She gave him a look. He scowled at her, in the way that brothers do.)

  They’d descended into a round and empty room with a floor covered in white dust and shattered old pots. Strange emblems adorned the curved walls of the dome-shaped chamber — lightning bolts and bats, eyes and mouths, jackals and teeth.

  “What the Hell is this?” Stone said under his breath.

  “I hear you,” Morg whispered.

  “Okay,” Graves said as he did a quick turn. “When did we arrive in ancient Egypt? Or is this some of that translocative substantiation, or whatever the hell you call it?”

  “Tran-substantive locationism,” Cross corrected. “And the answer is ‘no’.”

  “Gosh, thanks,” Graves said.

  “What is this place?” Morg asked him, but it was Snow who answered.

  “A crypt, just like it looks. The vampires worship very old deities.” She spoke with confidence and poise. Cross knew she was faking it, but he was glad she’d decided to make her presence known.

  “Can you still track down here?” Morg asked pointedly.

  “Of course.” Snow didn’t falter a moment.

  “Then get to it.”

  There were three small alcoves in the room, each of which bore a curved door that had to be opened by pressing a stone trigger on the wall next to it. The triggers were cleverly hidden, and it took Snow some time to get a good reading due to the interference created by the stone, which had been built with trans-substantive dampening properties to prevent anyone from using magic to gain access to the inside of the crypt. The only way in was to use the physical entrance.

  Talk about being overprotective, Cross thought. Humans have never been able to teleport. I wonder if this place was safeguarded against other vampires. But who would build a crypt to guard against other vampires?

  Cross looked at the walls,
and up the hole.

  Better yet…

  “I wonder who’s buried here,” he said quietly.

  “What?” Stone asked.

  “This is a crypt, right?” Cross said. “Who’s buried here? Or what?”

  “Who cares?” Stone said. Stone was an intimidating man, not so much from his impressive physical demeanor – his chiseled and dark skin had its share of scars and tattoos, he had an angular face, big eyes and a lean, quick frame – but because of his manner. Stone was generally quiet, and he chose his words carefully. He preferred to kill quickly and from a distance, and he rarely fraternized for any reason.

  “You should,” Cross said. “We all should. It might be useful to know why Red came down here.”

  “I think it’s a bit late to worry about that now,” Stone said.

  “Which way?” Morg asked Snow.

  “That way,” she said as she extended her hand. Her blank eyes stared ahead. “Margrave…Red…went that way.”

  Stone took the point, and when he pulled open the stone door Cross felt something right away: a charnel presence, a corrupted arcane energy signature that he recognized from his experience in the field.

  “There’s Crujian technology in here,” he said, aware that his own eyes were glowing now, set alight by his spirit. “It’s probably coming from suits of hexed combat armor.” He focused. “There are at least four vampires waiting for us there. Maybe more.”

  “This door has been opened recently,” Graves said after he looked at it for a moment. “It used to be sealed up tight.”

  “All right, then,” Morg said. “Look sharp.”

  Stone took a breath, and stepped through the door.

  NINE

  HOLE

  The squad stepped into a long and wide-open dark corridor. They were beneath the shallow lake, in an open catacomb of rust-colored rock, broken iron machines and dank sarcophagi covered in mold and mildew. Thick green fluid dripped from the ceiling. The air was cloying and rich. Shallow streams of stagnant water flowed between rows of open stone coffins. Narrow planks of rusted steel bridged the symmetrical isles of the dead. The water reflected the orange-yellow glow of Kray’s lamp and turned the air gritty, so that looking around was like peering through an ashen haze. Crumbling pillars of steel and mortar and clusters of rotted pipe supported the high-vaulted ceiling, which stood at least twenty feet over their heads.