She’s never loved anyone, not really, not until Cole, the one woman who would never fully trust her or open up to Danica no matter how badly she wanted her to.
And then came Black Scar, and the Revengers. Those are times she will never forget, no matter how hard she tries.
She hears the tortured cries of prisoners and the painful echoes of loss. Humans turned to chattel. Deep pits of industrial grease and blasting vents used to clear black rock in the search for red diamonds. Vats of waste poured onto prisoners as punishment for someone else’s crime. Gladiator games that make Krul look tame, and forgiving.
The worst monsters are the human ones.
No, the best times are what come later, after she meets Eric Cross. After he saves her.
She’ll never tell him how she feels, not in a million years, and not because she thinks he’ll derive some pleasure from it or hold it against her.
Quite the contrary: he would do nothing of the sort, and she knows it. He knew what he was doing when he spared her life, in spite of the fact she’d had a good friend of his killed.
She’s never understood his kindness, or his mercy. And she doubts she ever will.
Black woke up on the beach. She smelled salt and seaweed, gunpowder and hexed soil. The dark waves from the turgid sea crashed against the shore. Dark galleons, long abandoned, had been moored in the harbor. The dawn sun peeked through a wall of red-grey clouds. Ice-wreathed stones sat like broken teeth on the face of a small island, and wisps of black steam rolled across the surface of the water.
Her breath frosted in the chill air. Danica’s body was soaked beneath her armor and clothing.
Kane, Ronan and Maur were all there, and they checked their weapons. They were as wet and as frozen as she was. Maur’s face-wrap was gone, and his misshapen face was twisted in anger. Kane’s shoulder-length hair was pasted back against his scalp. Ronan stripped down to his armored vest, exposing arms layered in tattoos and scars.
Black’s spirit circled her like a protective cloud. She smelled his rage, and the air pulsated with his anxiousness. He was more terrified than any of them.
“Nice place,” Kane said. “We should get a summer home here.”
“This climate is great for my skin,” Ronan smiled.
“Holy shit,” Kane laughed. “You actually, like…broke a grin.”
“Well, we are going to die,” Ronan shrugged.
“Maur is not going to die,” the Gol said.
“None of us are,” Black added. “Now let’s find Cross and get the hell out of here.”
The ruins of Shadowmere Keep stood just off the beach on elevated ground covered in frozen grass and chunks of broken granite. The keep’s cracked walls swarmed with black moss and scorch marks from past conflicts. The parapets had crumbled, and shattered flooring and rafters were visible through the aged stone. Broken siege equipment sat rotting and abandoned.
Dark shapes took form in the sky. At first they looked like kites, but after a moment they took on the shape of winged humanoids armed with blades. Like the shadow wraiths from the crater, they had no discernible features or dimensions. They folded in and out of themselves, two-dimensional fliers that gained startling size as they drew close.
It was as good a time as any for the team to make sure the ammo they’d brought would work in whatever quasi-reality they now inhabited.
Danica’s H&K G36C, Kane’s M4A1, Ronan’s MP5 and Maur’s mini-uzi tore the sky apart with a thunderous barrage of sound. Smoke and bullets streamed through the air in slow-motion, as if tethered by the dank skin of the seaside netherworld. Black felt the bonds of the spirit-maintained reality falter and shift, like stones dropped in gelatin.
The flying wraiths dodged the bullets at first, but as the shooters came to understand the dimensions of the unstable atmosphere they now inhabited – and the resultant delaying effect it had on the course of their bullets – it was easy for them to adjust, to calculate how long it took for their shots to actually reach where they’d aimed.
Black’s spirit shielded the four mercenaries and repelled the specters. Bullets tore the apparitions to dust.
“Are we done screwing around now?” Ronan asked.
“There’s the grump we all know,” Kane nodded. “Nice to have you back.”
Danica shook her head. Even in a life-or-death situation, those two would never change.
There was no visible gate to Shadowmere Keep, so they followed the wall until they found an opening. After a time they came across what must have once been a tunnel that allowed access to the sea. That tunnel had become a massive break in the wall, and churning waters flowed straight into the heart of the keep. A narrow bank of muddy ground ran on either side of the wide channel.
They split up, two to a side, Ronan and Maur, and Kane and Black. Shattered walkways hung over their heads. The wind whistled like phantoms through gaps in the shattered architecture. Bits of seaweed and tattered tapestry rippled in the cold breeze.
They walked in silence. The two groups stayed in sight of each other. Drifts of black refuse covered their boots with a film of greasy muck. They walked though open rooms filled with debris. The sea was at their backs, and they heard the crash of waves.
Nothing stirred in the keep.
The waterway came to an end at the shattered remains of a gutted-out building. Only the shell of its wooded frame remained, leaving the interior exposed to the icy ocean wind. The outer keep wall stood just beyond the building.
Black smelled funeral pyre. The air was heavy with decay and dark ice.
Each group came to the end of the water channel, where the separate paths converged at a wide and crumbling walkway that extended into the water. A dark and sandy shore sat at the end of broken stone, and that was where they saw him.
Black’s heart pounded, and her stomach filled with dread.
Cross was on the shore, knee-deep in the water. His head was lowered, and his arms were tied behind his back.
He looked little like the man they knew.
He’d aged at least two decades. His once-thick hair had thinned considerably and had started to go grey, his skin looked leathery and weathered, and when he looked up at them his eyes were filled with sorrow, weariness and loss. Tears stained his bearded face, and for a moment he didn’t seem to recognize them.
The team ran to him. He was gagged, and when they tried to pull him up from his knees he didn’t have the strength to rise.
Danica pulled the cloth out of his mouth and wrapped her arms around him. Cross looked up and smiled weakly at her. He seemed only barely awake.
“Eric?” she said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I’m not deaf. Yet.”
“What the hell happened?” Kane asked.
Cross’ eyes went wide as he came to his senses.
“Go!” he yelled. “Red is here! You have to get…”
The dark shadow congealed overhead, that same chill presence they’d encountered in the crater, but it was more focused than before, larger, and much more powerful.
“Now what?” Kane shouted.
The wind rose to a gale force, a spectral hurricane blast that smelt of burning cinders. The shadow vaguely resembled a human female, except that it was twenty-feet tall and made of molten darkness. Black lightning and splashes of red acid emanated from the oily mass. The spectral nightmare towered over them, a roiling pillar of fumes and ash.
“Spread out!” Black yelled. “Don’t give her any easy targets.”
That’s not a plan, Danica yelled at herself. That’s you, freaking out. Get it together.
Danica hauled Cross back towards the entrance. Kane and Ronan fired their weapons at the black cloud as they and Maur dodged through the skeletal ruins.
The angry spirit gave pursuit. Claws lashed out and tore at the ruined structure. Stone and wood rained down in an avalanche of dust and debris. The air filled with a droning metal screech, a cavalcade of sonic screams. Funnels of exploding s
ound tore trenches into the ground.
Danica and Cross ran as fast as they could. Black waited for the impact, and she expected rubble and wooden wreckage to crash on top of them at any moment.
“Danica, stop!” Cross yelled, and he pulled back from her and turned around. “No more running…we have to face her!”
“Like hell we do!”
She spun and sent her spirit out as a lash of cold blades. He cut through the hail of stone rain and ripped the shadow in half. A backlash of energies exploded like a black scream.
Waves of sick power fell against Danica and Cross. They were thrown into the air.
The ground crashed up at her. Pain spread up and down the side of her body. The breath was blasted from her lungs.
The air grew taut. Winter-frost moisture fell from the bulging air like sweat. Danica felt everything push. Brick and steel bulged outward.
Dust drifts took the shape of humanoids, like those from the crater, and they moved to grab Cross.
She needs him, Danica realized. She’s gained control, but she’s only here because he is. That’s why he’s still alive.
“Kane!” she shouted, and Black wrapped her spirit around herself. “Get over here!”
She stood and faced the storm, knowing full well it might be the last thing she ever did.
The black funnel that was Cross’ spirit – Red, he called her, which meant it was Margrave Azazeth, the Traitor of Thornn, given new life and purpose as a phantom tied to the very man who’d killed her in the first place – swirled close to the ground. Fragments of rock and water from the channel gathered in her black form.
Danica’s spirit ripped through the black wraiths like shreds of shadow paper. Disembodied cries of lives long lost rang in her ears.
Kane, Ronan and Maur appeared behind the murderous spirit. Hexed bullets tore into the cyclonic body. The gunfire blasts were drowned out by the howl of Red’s swirling echo voice, a thousand screams fused into a lunatic dirge.
The sky had gone black. Light sucked into her vortex form.
Danica threw herself on top of Cross’ unconscious body and shielded him from his own spirit. She was only there a moment before something latched onto her neck from behind: a frost-cold claw, a slithering tentacle of dripping shadow. The touch sent chills down her spine and made her skin numb. Her feet kicked at open air as the spirit lifted her from the ground.
Kane and Ronan blasted the tentacle away. Danica fell again, but this time her spirit caught her moments before she would have fallen onto blade-handed black wraiths waiting below.
She drew her katars and slashed into them. Her spirit sheathed her body with a burning cloak. The greasy remains of slaughtered ghosts dripped off her skin and ran down her face. She grit black-stained teeth and hacked through more wraiths. Her muscles burned. Silhouette assassins exploded out of the walls. They were everywhere, spewed from wisps of shadow ejected by the renegade spirit.
What the hell do we do?
Maur screamed. Wraiths clawed him and dragged him to the ground. Ronan shouted and slashed through black shadows to get to the Gol.
Kane ran towards Danica with desperation in his eyes. His assault rifle sprayed hexed ghost-slayer rounds into the shadows.
Danica stood over Cross and hacked through the ghost flesh of more attackers. Cold and icy blood covered her body.
How do you kill a spirit?
As if in answer, Cross’ eyes shot open, and he reached up and grabbed her wrist.
“I couldn’t do it…” he gasped. His voice sounded like something inside him had broken, like he was unsure he’d ever speak again. “I couldn’t…put her to sleep…”
“What are you talking about?!” Black shouted, but her voice was drowned out by Red’s metal howl.
Danica lashed out with her spirit and drove back a trio of black wraiths. Red hovered over them like a vast snake.
“Take this…” he coughed. He pulled her hand into his and put something there, something small and made of glass.
Red came down on top of them.
Black’s spirit howled in agony as he shielded Danica from an attack that should have torn her in half. Instead she flew back, crippled with pain. Blood sky and black water circled in her vision.
and she is down, in the water, underwater, clawing at the surface, dim fluid in her lungs, choking her, flailing, no direction, skeletons in the sea, floating corpses buried under rubble, staring at her, the dead staring at her, accusing
God I know them I know that look their pain
and she kicks and claws her way back to the surface
She gasped for air as she pushed herself to the surface. She fell back down, surfaced again.
The wraiths had Cross. They pulled him into the air, towards the swirling vortex of what had once been Margrave Azazeth.
Danica clawed at the shore. Dark blood sluiced up and down her arms. Her armor was torn open at the stomach and shoulders, and she bled profusely where a shard of rock had embedded in her side.
What did he mean ‘he couldn’t do it’?
The dark spirit thinned. It bore like a drill into the sky. The wraiths lifted Cross up, meaning to dump him into the vortex, and then his spirit would bear him away.
She can’t survive without him. She wants to keep him safe.
Black opened her hand and saw a sealed vial filled with dark fluid. She felt it pulsate in her fingers, and it made her hand numb. Her spirit shied away, not wanting her to touch it.
How the vial had stayed with him all that time, she’d never know.
She recognized that liquid, as well as the arcane signature buried within it. Black looked up at Cross and knew what had to be done.
“Get him!” she shouted, and she struggled out of the water.
Kane was knocked backwards by a wraith, and black blood seeped from his wound.
Maur, bloodied and bruised but still alive, blasted Red with his mini-uzi. The hexed bullets perforated her form and gave her pause. She caused the ground to ripple, and the Gol was thrown aside.
Ronan leapt to grab Cross. There was no way to get to the mage without passing through the spinning black maelstrom. Arcane blades ripped through Ronan’s skin. Blood sprayed from his body like a spinning fan, but he still managed to grapple Cross and pull him back to the ground.
Wraiths flew at the men where they landed, but Black blasted them away with her spirit.
Hollow growls clawed at her mind. The world pulsed and throbbed. Stones flew at her. Her spirit cast them aside and wrapped round her body. Pain seared her skin and drove her to her knees.
Kane shouted to her. He and Maur were lifted into the air. Red had become a razor storm. She pulled them towards her core, an orifice of grinding teeth.
Danica crawled. Every motion was a trial of pain.
Ronan lay face-down. The skin on his arms had been shredded, and his body gushed blood. Cross lay next to him, barely conscious, and he struggled to rise as Red seized Ronan’s body and picked it up off the ground.
Pain gripped Danica’s stomach with such force she could barely move. She knew she’d been wounded, that something protruded from her abdomen and that she poured blood onto the ground, but she refused to look at the injury.
She pulled herself close to Cross and grabbed him just as she was whipped towards the vortex to be devoured along with Kane and Maur and Ronan. Cross came with her. She had his wrist, and they dangled in the air like puppets.
With every last vestige of her strength, Danica pulled him close, opened the vial with her left hand and put it to his mouth. She forced the fluid down.
The liquid congealed the shadow vapor. The spirit gained density. It became fluid, and lost its gaseous body. It slowed and thickened. The air around it lost its rigidity. The shadow howls dimmed and faded. Black wraith minions dissipated and fell away.
Slowly, everyone sank down out of the air. The spirit’s tenebrous grip loosened as its tendrils turned to clay. The tornado spirit became solid. It turned
into Red. It congealed and melted into a humanoid form that shrank away, no longer alive. She collapsed into a pile of dust.
Black and Cross and Kane and Ronan and Maur gently came to ground, all of them wounded, maybe even dead.
Danica couldn’t feel her legs, and she came to rest on her side, as if ready to wrap herself into a deep sleep.
The fluid was a spirit sedative: Narcosm, she thought. She’d heard of it when she’d been with The Revengers. It was a dangerous substance, and she knew Cross’ dose had been crafted by Ilfesa Warfield. A single drink of Narcosm would sedate a spirit, and render it lethargic. An entire vial would be the equivalent of putting a spirit into a coma.
Danica turned and looked at Cross. The pain that wracked her body was intense, but she had to see him, had to make sure…
His eyes stared back at her. They were glassy, and filled with fear, but the look on his face was serene.
Somehow, he’d been trapped there with Red since the fall of Shadowmere Keep. The Cross they’d known had wound up in the past, trapped, a prisoner of his own spirit, both of them refugees in time. Why had she kept him there? Why hadn’t she taken the vial of Narcosm away?
“Is he…” Kane asked as he stumbled over. “Is he alive?” His chest and arms bled. He looked at Ronan. “Oh, fuck!!!”
Kane and Maur, both badly hurt and at the edge of death themselves, ignored their wounds and tended to their teammate, whose flesh looked like he’d fallen into a pool of razors. Ronan coughed and sputtered up blood. He screamed out in pain as he came to.
Cross lay there, quiet, as if asleep. He looked so ragged, and so old. So time beaten and weathered.
You are, Danica thought. We all are. That was why you saved me, maybe…both me and Kane. You found other people who were like you. People who’d been beaten down, stretched thin…always doing, always going, always fighting.
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