Something inside of Cross died at that moment.
He stepped onto the arena floor unbidden. The tall skeletal form that was the master of ceremonies recoiled, and it hovered higher off the ground.
Cross’ breathing came in fast and violent bursts. He felt like he’d grown jaws. His spirit concentrated her form into a nimbus of crackling black energy that filled the air with the tang of ozone and burning matter. She covered his left arm like a gauntlet of shifting shadows.
Tower stepped onto the arena. Its great blade was honed from a single shard of obsidian steel. Its armored faceplate concealed dead and false skin. Salt-and-pepper hair had been pulled back to reveal entirely blank and useless eyes. The Regost’s boots stamped the stone as it marched. It kicked up dust and made pale clouds of bone debris.
Tower charged without a moment’s hesitation, the attack silent but for the shift of its armor. Cross’ bone blade was in his hands in time to deflect the first heavy blow and spin Tower away, but the Regost’s timing had improved, and it turned and hammered two, three more blows against Cross’ blade. He fought one-handed, held the bastard blade at an angle that made it an extension of his arm. He moved with the attacks, and even though the blows rattled his bones his feet were fluid and kept moving.
Cross counterattacked. His strikes were fast, aimed to deliver quick jabs into Tower’s husk of a body, testing his defenses rather than seeking to do damage. Tower’s armor was thicker than Cross’, made of dark plate held in place with leather straps. Soul smoke churned beneath the faceplate and out of artificial eyes as the Regost furiously blocked Cross’ blows with such strength it was a wonder the blades didn’t snap.
His spirit retained her composure. Something about their bond with Ekko calmed her. She was able to wait rather than explode in anger, which would have surely killed them both.
Cross continued to dance around his opponent, and while the Regost’s host body wouldn’t tire, the vaporous being within grew impatient. Dark and spectral steam wrapped around the flesh automaton and turned the air into haze. Steel rang against steel and sent sparks to the ground.
Unmoving faces watched the two warriors shift and dance. Cross’ heart pumped with power and anxiety. His spirit froze his arm till it was nearly ice.
He anticipated Tower’s moves. Every sword swing was a powerful strike, but he moved quicker than Cross recalled, so both the force and speed of the attacks made the Regost difficult to guard against. Regardless, Cross could dictate the direction from which Tower launched its strikes simply by changing his own stance.
He saw Dillon’s nod in his mind’s eye.
Cross grit his teeth, stepped in close, and forced Tower to set its feet and make a downward swing that would take Cross’ head and arm off at the shoulder. His spirit exploded around his skin, scalded him with bitter cold that froze into a solid barrier around his left arm.
His veins froze. His bones felt brittle and weak.
Cross’ arm was coated in dark frost, and he held it out before him like a shield. The ice armor ruptured as Tower’s sword crashed down, and both sword and ice shattered like glass. Black crystal light and fused steel exploded into crystal shards.
Pain echoed down Cross’ body in waves. Every bone in his arm broke, and he screamed in pain.
But with Tower committed and its weapon destroyed – Cross’ magic had never touched the Regost, only its sword – Cross threw himself into his opponent and pushed his bone blade into Tower’s abdomen. The Regost panicked, put all of its life force into holding its host body upright, but Cross kicked forward and threw off its weight, forced his enemy deeper onto his sword. Cross sank his blade in to its hilt.
Blinded with pain, Cross held the blade firm. Dark artificial blood pooled around his unwounded hand. His spirit held on in the air behind him, extended, exhausted. He watched the gray liquid vapor of the Regost drain away. The creature’s life force sizzled as it fell to the ground like dripping fat.
Cross collapsed onto his knees. Already he felt Ekko’s vampiric power fuse his shattered bones back together. His spirit did what she could to numb the intense pain. Tears welled in his eyes. He heard his bones crack as they mended and realigned like puzzle pieces inside of his flesh. The world spun, and then it seemed to fall away beneath him, as if he floated. He dropped his sword.
He felt the disapproving eyes of Morganna and the vampire elite. Cross looked up at them defiantly. Hatred for the vampires of Krul burned in his soul.
Cross teetered at the edge of consciousness. He arched his body backwards and looked up at the prisoner’s slab, that grisly chandelier that hung over the battlefield. Dillon had passed out. Cole, her eyes deep and sallow and her arms riddled with so many cuts that she looked like a grisly road map, gave him a faint smile.
Down on the circle, Kane watched him with grim and knowing eyes. He also smiled, ever so slightly.
Danica Black did not. Her eyes bore straight through to his soul. For a moment, Cross didn’t understand why she regarded him with such hatred, but as the tide of pain washed over him and he slipped towards unconsciousness he realized the truth.
You want Dillon to suffer, because he killed your brother. You chose me…because you thought that I would fail. All this time, even with your deal, you meant for Dillon to die.
His last thoughts, before he passed out, were of killing Danica Black.
THIRTEEN
DUEL
They run. They have turned from hunters into prey.
Dark silhouettes of fangs and blades pursue them through the trees. The vampires will have them soon – there is no doubt of that, nor any way to avoid it. It is the shadow in the sky that he fears, the shadow that will bring death.
What is this place? he asks as they run. He should be out of breath, unable to speak from exhaustion, but he isn’t.
It is a place from before the world, Lucan says. A slice of a time from before there was time. A refuge of the soul, and of the mind.
Cross wonders if that makes sense to him. It doesn’t.
They run over sharp stones and up the sides of barren brown hills. The pink and gray sky melts beneath shadows and black clouds that smother everything in an ebon wave.
It destroyed me, Lucan says. It destroyed my body, but what is left of my primal spirit still lives, scattered. It was thrown like shards of glass through the night. Some of those shards stuck to other creatures, like you, and Ekko, and Danica Black.
Mages, Cross realizes. Two mages, and another who touches spirits. All of them had been in close proximity to Lucan and the Sleeper during the battle over the lake.
The Sleeper…
Lives, Lucan explains. It comes for you now, to finish you off. It is afraid. We can hurt it…we can imprison it again. Not many souls such as mine exist. It wants you destroyed. All of you.
The shadow leaks into the furthest reaches of the sky.
But most of all, it searches for my master. She is the one who presents the most present danger to the Sleeper’s freedom. She is the woman that you were sent to find.
The Woman in the Ice…
Cross growled as he woke. Despair crushed him.
I didn’t ask for this. Any of this.
But neither had Dillon.
His bones had re-knit themselves. His muscles burned like they’d been cut and dipped in salt, but he could function, and he could move. He could fight.
Ekko had reached out to him psychically, and infected him. The vampire’s telepathic bond with Cross made him feral and bloodthirsty, but it also gave him incredible regenerative capabilities. He didn’t want to test its limits, but he knew that before long he would have to. He only hoped that Ekko’s captors didn’t find a way to block the connection. It had been foolish to speak with Ramsey about Ekko’s being Turned, but it had been the only way for Cross to be sure of what was happening to him.
He rose. There was a sharp, almost tearing pain buried deep in his stomach. He wondered if there wasn’t some internal damage, s
omething that couldn’t be fixed by either his spirit or Ekko’s vampiric power.
Not long ago he would have worried that the pain was an effect of the food and drink they’d given him. He knew that it was tainted: there had never been any question regarding that. They wouldn’t want him at full strength except during the duels in the arena.
But now that’s out of their hands, he thought with grim satisfaction. Now Ekko heals me, and she purges those poisons out of my system, just like a spirit would.
Cross tried not to think too much about the fact that he benefitted from a vampire’s power, that it was the strength of creatures he hated to the core of his being that now allowed him to carry on when he should have already failed.
His heart burned with anger, and he pushed himself until his muscles burned with pain. He ran back and forth, pushed off of the walls with his booted feet. He stayed twice as long in the plank position, and pushed his body to its limits. He didn’t tire. He punched the air until his arms were so sore from motion that he couldn’t move. It didn’t matter. His body would heal before his next battle.
He wasn’t sure how it worked, exactly. He felt no thirst for blood, no ravenous hunger like a vampire’s victims were supposed to feel when they were Turned, or when they were in the process of being Turned. But hatred fueled him: hatred for vampires, for the leaders of Krul…and hatred for Danica Black. The rational part of his brain knew that he couldn’t kill her, if for no other reason than the fact that he needed her. If what was left of Lucan, those bits of his ancient soul, had indeed bonded with Cross and Ekko and Black, she had to live.
But not for one second longer than is necessary, he promised himself.
He went through his motions, through thrusts and parries and dodges. Cross battled imaginary foes. He worked himself to a sweat. He drank water, and at some point was given food, real food, a metal bowl filled with strips of cured pork and beef and a crust of bread along with a jug of purple wine. He devoured it all, and licked the juices from his aching fingers.
It was difficult to slow his mind down. He had to determine how they would escape. They had to save the Woman in the Ice. If she fell, the Dra’aalthakmar, the Sleeper, would raze the cities of the Southern Claw and the Ebon Cities alike, and while Cross didn’t give two shits about the vampires he didn’t want to be the man who’d failed humankind. There had to be a way out, and one that didn’t rely on Danica Black. He knew now that they would never be released, no matter how well or how many times they fought.
Cross fell onto the cot, exhausted. Bright sunlight seeped through the high bars of the door, and the air was sticky and hot. It would be some time still before nightfall. He allowed his body to rest, even though his mind continued to race and rage.
He stands on an ashen peak. The night sky is vast and starless. The wind is bitter with the taste of glacial salt, and so cold it makes the air brittle. Cracks in the ground threaten to widen and swallow him up.
The mountaintop is surrounded by a void. It is an island of ruined stone in a sea of endless night. The ground shifts beneath his feet like a raft lost in an inky sea.
The Sleeper is there. It is a thick and charnel presence, a smoking husk of primordial rage and defiled power.
His feet kick mounds of dust like fine black snow as he circles, trying to gain advantage against a foe that can likely destroy him with ease. The Sleeper manifests a physical presence. It is a tall and thin shadow of bladed edges and serpentine limbs, with eyes like dead stars. Cross tries to lock his eyes onto its form, but his mind burns from the effort. The Sleeper is an inconstant, an eye-numbing haze in the vague semblance of a giant.
He realizes he does not face the shadow alone. His spirit hugs painfully against his skin, like armor made from shards of broken steel. There are two others there with them atop the thin spire of crumbling rock, standing next to him at the foot of a Stygian titan.
One of them is Ekko, pale and bloody, her eyes dead crimson, her hands replaced with thick claws encased in iron gauntlets.
The other is Danica Black. Her katars are as ebon as her armor, and the fresh scar around her right eye is bloody and raw. She looks at Cross, and he looks back, their eyes direct doorways into their tainted souls.
Even with that brief connection, that understanding, they both know there will be more blood spilled between them. And that only one of them will survive.
He was shaken awake by vampire sentries. His vision swam, and his head throbbed with pain. The runes on his forearms pulsated with bloody purple light, and for the first time Cross realized it wasn’t the food or drink that kept him in a dreamlike state, but the arcane runes that had been cast onto his skin. They made him more susceptible to the vampire’s control and suggestion. It occurred to him that those runes might have been how Ekko had managed to maintain their empathic vampire bond – the shards of Lucan’s soul that had embedded themselves in Cross, Black and Ekko in the wake of his apparent destruction had established a link between the three living mages, but these mind-weakening runes had in their own way perpetuated it. If not for them, Cross doubted Ekko ever would have been able to reach out and telepathically infect him at all.
Telepathic vampirism. I’ve officially heard it all.
Cross was fit into his armor by withered zombie hands. His gauntlet was clamped onto his hand and his blade was strapped to his back. His spirit cooled against his skin like a soothing vapor.
He cleared his mind. He was brought again to the arena. The trip was clearer this time. The controlling runes were losing their efficacy. He saw the stone halls wrought in blood-spattered stone. They were lined with the cells of other condemned prisoners, their eyes vacant and hollow, their faces grim, sucked of all life. Each of those condemned inmates looked as dead on the outside as he felt on the inside.
Cross passed bladed reliquaries and filthy operating rooms with stained floors. There was a chamber where the pieces of a dead giant were being grafted together to form a titan zombie, a tower of shambling armored flesh held up by scaffolding and dark iron ladders. Cross walked on bridges that spanned pools of bubbling acid fuel. He walked through open courtyards populated by bone trees that grew in blood soil. He smelled decay and human fear in exercise yards, where prisoners were forced to leap over swinging blades and duck beneath oversized claws. Chambers grew long with shadows as the sun descended. The air turned as dark as wine, and the sound of chains rang like song through the approaching night.
The air turned pale as they approached the arena, and it was heavy with the tang of sweat. Cross wondered if the cold feeling inside of him was still fear. He should have felt more apprehension as he approached those doors. His limbs should have shaken, and thoughts of doubt should have plagued his mind. But all he felt was the cold, a gnawing chill that encased his heart, as if in armor.
The doors groaned open, and the arena waited for him. He was once again the last fighter to arrive. The prisoner slab had already started its descent, and it filled the air with stone and metal noise. The fading desert light from outside was overwhelmed by the burn of floating silver torches. The predatory bone serpents passed nearby as he entered the room, and he smelled their dead breath. He ignored the undead eyes that glared down at him. His own eyes were cast ahead, locked on his opponent.
Danica Black waited for him. Her armor had been discarded in favor of mobility and speed. Her dark-bladed katars shone with a wicked crimson light, and her dark clothing made her fade into the shadows. Pale and tattooed skin was exposed at her neck and midriff, and her bare and serpent-inked arms ended in dark fingerless gloves. Her hair was the color of blood, and her black lips were sealed in a determined scowl.
Cross had never beheld a woman as beautiful as she.
He drew his blade as he approached the arena floor, and with his other hand he removed his armor coat and dropped it to the ground. His eyes never left Black’s, but at the corner of his vision he saw movement near the commander’s chairs in the stadium seats, likely a gesture m
ade by Drake or Morganna to indicate that they approved of the match.
Only when he’d reached the pale killing floor did Cross allow his eyes to go up, to look upon the dying. Cross knew he would carry what he saw there with him for the rest of his life, whether he wanted to or not.
Dillon looked withered. His skin hung loose from his bones. His one eye was sunken and dark, and his mouth hung slack. He looked feverish, but he was so devoid of strength he couldn’t even shake in pain. His legs had been stripped of much of their meat, but they’d been expertly bandaged and tended so he that would not die quickly of his wounds. The skin where his wrists and ankles were bound was raw and dried with blood. One of his feet was gone.
He looked nothing like Dillon. He was some dying old man.
Cross caught his gaze. It was a bead of glass. There was no recognition. Whatever part of Dillon had been holding on to hope and life for all of that time was now gone. The ranger was still alive, but only on the outside.
Cross took a cold, deep breath. He felt like a tear should have come, but nothing did, and that itself made his despair even more.
I’m sorry, Dillon.
Cross tried to remember his childhood, some piece of innocence he may have once felt. He wanted to remember a simpler time, when he wasn’t surrounded by all of this madness. He hoped there was some piece of him, something locked and buried away deep in his soul, that remembered those better days, because his conscious mind could no longer find them, and he doubted it ever would again.
Danica started the fight. Cross expected the attack. Her spirit roared towards him in a tidal wave of black fire, an ocean of pure necrotic force and raw male power. Cross split the attack with his own spirit, who shone with diamond light. Black’s defenses cracked wide open, and for a second Cross saw his chance: a hole in her spirit’s power through which he could strike.
He didn’t.
Cross charged forward and aimed his bone blade at Danica’s exposed stomach. Her katars swept in, crackling with her spirit’s power. Cross’ arm snapped back in pain as the twin blades converged and shattered his bone sword into pieces. He fell onto his back, his arm alight with dark fire. Cross made a backhanded motion that swept Danica up and off the ground. She landed with a hard crack on the stone.
Black Scars (Blood Skies, Book 2) Page 16