Stormwind (The Storm Chronicles Book 3)

by Skye Knizley

  While she waited, she used the silver knife to cut several of the spears down to reasonable arrow-size. Fletching she made from feathers scavenged from Aspen’s purple braids and tips she fashioned from the medallion she’d taken from Josef Diarmait, using the hottest part of the fire to melt the silver so she could pour it into cracks in the floor. By the time she was done she had a dozen useable arrows and a double ended dagger, all with silver tips. She’d also eaten her fill of lizard meat and used some of the bones to fashion a needle and stitch her hand the rest of the way. She figured it would be healed in another hour or so.

  When they were done recuperating they made a pair of fresh torches and continued heading down the main tunnel, hoping it would eventually lead them to the surface. It wasn’t long before Raven’s sensitive hearing detected a noise like a blade on meat from somewhere ahead. She handed her torch to Aspen and crept forward, drawing the bow as she walked. She passed an empty corridor on her right and edged into another burial chamber at the end of the main hall. A lycan stood in the center among several sarcophagi, hovering over his latest kill. As Raven watched he shifted to human and knelt, using his knife to cut a section of skin from the body at his feet and hang it from his loincloth like a trophy.

  Raven stepped into the room, bow drawn.

  “Hey, can you tell me how to get to the Sears tower from here? I seem to be lost.”

  The lycan whirled in surprise and Raven put an arrow through his left eye socket. He dropped like a stone on top of his prey, landing with a sickening wet thud. Raven drew another arrow and entered the room, looking for any other threats or anything that might be useful. Ash was scattered across the far side of the room; the remains of two vampires recently killed. Raven searched the ash and found that both of the vampires had carried silvered spearheads that she added to her own collection. She also found a quiver of obsidian tipped arrows hung on the wall among several other weapons of ancient Native American design.

  Raven slipped her silvered arrows into the quiver and hung it over her shoulder before pulling the lycan’s body off of the dead human. She didn’t recognize him, but then the lycan hadn’t left much to identify. Unlike the others this one had been nearly torn to pieces.

  Raven kicked the lycan in disgust and turned away, returning to where Aspen was waiting, her torch held high.

  “What happened?” the purple-haired girl asked.

  “Another dead lycan, one dead familiar and two dead vamps with no house rings,” Raven replied. “I hadn’t thought about it, but none of the dead vamps have them.”

  “Do you have yours?” Aspen asked.

  Raven shook her head. “I hardly ever wear it. They took my bracelet, but I still have my necklace.”

  “I still have my triquetra, but nothing else,” Aspen said. “I wonder if they took them as trophies?”

  “More than likely they took them to make it harder for us to make weapons,” Raven said. “It’s all silver. Come on, that way is a dead end, let’s see where this goes.”

  She turned away and shone her torch down the corridor they hadn’t tried. Some distance ahead it opened into a staircase leading up. Drying blood covered the stairs and dripped onto the stone floor in long, slimy lines.

  “Marvelous,” Raven said. “I’m really getting sick of this place.”

  “That makes two of us,” Aspen said. “Are you going first or shall I?”

  “Don’t be a smartass,” Raven said, walking ahead and moving up the stairs.

  Aspen grinned. “But I am a smartass. It’s part of why you love me.”

  “If you say so, Asp...” Raven said, trailing off.

  Raven paused partway up the stairs and closed her eyes against what she was seeing. The hallway ahead was lined with bodies, dozens of familiars pinned to the wall like so much macabre artwork.

  “What’s wrong?” Aspen asked from behind her.

  “These bastards are going to pay,” Raven said, her fists beginning to shake.

  “Ray, what is it?”

  “Humans. Dozens of them, probably from all over the state,” Raven replied. “I think it’s a larder… a place to keep meat while they’re hunting us.

  “Gaia… What do we do?” Aspen asked.

  “Find the ones responsible and bury them,” Raven answered.

  She climbed the rest of the stairs and stepped onto the blood-slick floor, fighting not to be sick at the sight and smell of so much blood. There would be more before the day was out.

  Behind her Aspen was muttering a prayer for the dead. Raven listened to the ancient Gaelic and continued walking, repeating the prayer with her friend. By the time they reached the end of the corridor all of the victims had been blessed and any souls that remained released to their reward. With any luck that meant they wouldn’t taste very good when the lycans came for their feast.

  At the end of the corridor was an intersection that led left and right. Raven sniffed in each direction and could smell lycans, several of them coming from the left. She switched to her vampire sight and watched the lycans approaching, one on the floor and two on the walls, their polished claws digging into the stone as if it were soft mud.

  She waited a beat and threw her torch as hard as she could at the lead wolf. The torch caught him square in the face, spreading tar and flame all over his head and chest. He howled in pain and dropped to the ground, trying to put out the flames. The other two continued their charge, running even faster.

  Moving like she had all the time in the world, Raven drew her bow, knocked an arrow and put it through the middle of the left lycan’s skull. He died instantly, crashing to the ground and shivering as he reverted.

  She ducked back out of the way as the remaining lycan rounded the corner. He tried to turn his charge into a pounce, but Raven simply used her shoulder to flip the lycan onto his back. She grabbed his arm and twisted, dislocating the creature’s shoulder. To her surprise he rolled and jumped to his feet, pulling his arm free. He shook his wounded limb with a bone-rattling snap and ran his claws over the bloody wall, pulling off chips of old mortar. He then raised the sharp, bloody claws at Raven and roared; Raven bared her fangs in response and handed the bow to Aspen, circling to keep herself between the lycan and her friend.

  The lycan attacked with blinding speed, his claws opening bloody wounds in Raven’s right arm and thigh. She hissed in pain and struck back, her fists thudding into the creature’s muscular ribs, the jarring impact causing him to groan. In response the lycan grabbed her by the arms and threw her into the wall. Ancient stone cracked and splintered from the impact and Raven fell to the floor, her arrows scattering around her.

  She was just rising, her hand closing around one of the arrows when the lycan grabbed her by the back of the head and slammed her face first into the opposite wall. Raven felt blood spurt and heard a sound that she thought was probably her skull fracturing because stars began to do pinwheels behind her eyes. She sagged unconscious and the lycan threw her like a ragdoll into the opposite wall where she collapsed.

  She came to a few seconds later, her head swimming and Aspen calling her name.

  “Ray! Raven you have to get up! I can’t fight tall dark and hairy all by myself! Come on honey or we’re both going to be hanging on that damn wall!”

  Raven groaned and pushed off the floor, stone chips falling from her to mix with the mud and blood at her feet. She looked up to see the lycan clawing at Aspen who was keeping it at bay with a shield spell.

  “Hey, bub, I wasn’t finished with you yet,” she said, standing on shaky legs. “Is that the best you’ve got? What idiot would ever make you alpha?”

  The lycan turned in disbelief and growled. He lowered his head, his ears flattening as he watched the flame-haired woman.

  Raven wiped blood from her face and waited, fighting the urge to pant. She didn’t have long to wait. The lycan roared and leapt through the air, his claws outspread. Raven ducked and sidestepped the flying creature, using its momentum to get beside it. As
it passed by her left hand struck out and stabbed the end of the arrow she was holding straight through the lycan’s heart. The silver pierced his flesh like a knife through butter and he fell to the ground, already changing back to human.

  Raven leaned her aching head against the cold stone and stared at the body lying in a pool of her blood. The image was making her hungry and she wondered not for the first time what would happen if a Childe of Strohm fed from a lycan. Normal vampires and Embraced got sick. But what about someone spawned from a Sanguinarch?

  She shook off the thought as Aspen came up beside her.

  “You look like shit, honey,” the girl said.

  Raven smirked and wiped more blood from her jaw. “Thanks, Asp.”

  Aspen frowned and wiped hair from Raven’s face. “I’m sorry, but you do. You need blood. You’re winning, but these things are kicking your ass in the process. How long can you keep going?”

  “As long as it takes,” Raven replied, straightening with the help of the wall. “There has to be a way out of here.”

  Aspen shook her head. “Stubborn.”

  “Yes, you are,” Raven said.

  She smiled and waved in the general direction of her scattered arrows. “Can you retrieve those? I think if I bend over the top of my head is going to fall off.”

  Aspen nodded and went to do as Raven asked. Raven closed her eyes and leaned against the wall, concentrating all her energy on healing. When she opened her eyes sometime later she felt weaker, but knew the gushing head wound had healed and she could function. She raised her eyes and looked at Aspen who was standing in front of her holding arrows and looking worried.

  “What’s wrong?” Raven asked.

  “You’ve been standing there for fifteen minutes,” Aspen replied.

  “I was healing...fifteen minutes? Really?”

  “Yeah,” Aspen said, handing Raven the arrows. “It was like you went into torpor sleep or something.”

  “Great. More like Mom every day,” Raven replied said, ramming the arrows into her quiver. “Next I’ll be drinking warm blood out of crystal and calling everyone darling.”

  Aspen grinned. “Nah. You’re more of a shot glass and ‘asshole’ kind of girl.”

  Raven laughed and turned to continue up the hallway. “Thanks, Asp.”

  “No problem, love,” Aspen said, still smiling.

  The pair went down the hall and turned the corner to find yet another staircase, this one leading back down. With nowhere else to go, Raven led the way a step at the time until she could see the floor below. Blood covered the black and red stone and she could see marks in the blood as if something or someone had been dragged away. She glanced back at Aspen and readied her bow, knocking one of the obsidian arrows.

  The stairs emptied out onto a sticky floor. Unlike the floors above none of the walls had any hieroglyphs or pictograms. These were instead plain red shot through with streaks of black mortar and smeared with blood, some ancient and some less than twelve hours old.

  Raven squatted and looked at the tracks. Two pairs of large clawed paws had dragged away someone wearing shoes or boots with a blocky heel.

  “I’d guess a woman’s size nine,” Aspen said, kneeling beside her. “And werewolf size freaking huge like all the others.”

  “Thank you for the insight, Doctor Watson,” Raven said. “So why did it take two huge lycans to drag away one woman with size nine feet? Especially when it looks like she was unconscious.”

  “Some kind of honor guard for the dead?” Aspen guessed.

  “Maybe,” Raven said. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  The two women straightened and began to move down the hallway, their steps quiet and catlike. As they neared the end of the hallway it brightened and they could hear the sounds of fighting; bone on bone and flesh on flesh. Raven relaxed her bow long enough to hand her silvered knife to Aspen and then drew it tight again before stepping into the light.

  The room ahead was wide and circular, much like the room they’d almost drowned in before. A narrow walkway ran around the rim of the room past a series of lycan and wolf statues to another corridor at the far end. The heart of the room was sunk twenty feet below the surface and had a floor covered in bones and straw. Bone weapons of various types lined the walls with rope ladders placed at intervals to allow the creatures in the pit egress.

  In the pit itself were four muscular lycan warriors. At first it looked as if they were fighting each other; claws flashed and they snarled threats at one another. It was only after a hard look that Raven realized they were squabbling over the remains of a human woman like a pack of dogs tearing apart prey.

  Raven growled low in her throat and drew back her bow. She let fly and the arrow passed through the head of one of the lycans. He had barely hit the floor when her second shot pierced the heart of another. Before the warriors realized what was going on Raven had put three of them down. The fourth dropped the arm he’d been fighting for and jumped, using one of the rope ladders to scramble up the sheer wall. Raven backed away, keeping Aspen behind her and firing arrows when she thought she had a shot.

  The lycan however kept behind the statues as much as possible, only popping out to scurry forward and draw Raven’s fire. With every move he made, Raven and Aspen moved further into the corridor until they were against the stairs once more. The lycan stepped into the corridor and growled, the low rumble sounding like distant thunder. Raven loosed the arrow she’d held knocked, the tip aimed straight at the lycan’s vulnerable eye.

  With blinding speed the lycan caught the arrow, the shaft squealing against its claws like a buzzsaw. He snapped the arrow between his fingers and roared, causing Raven to roll her eyes.

  “Again? Yeah I get it, you guys are big tough First Clan lycans from hell,” she said. “I’m not impressed. You’re nothing but dog crap waiting to be squashed.”

  The lycan snarled in response and ran forward on all fours, blood and saliva trailing behind him. Raven pushed Aspen back and waited for the lycan to pounce. When he did, she caught him mid leap and drove him face first into the wall with the satisfying crunch of bone. He rebounded off the stone, blood dripping from his broken muzzle and she tore his throat out in a spray of blood and cartilage. The lycan fell to its knees, but not before grabbing Raven around the throat and dragging her down with him. He crawled on top of her, his weight crushing her windpipe.

  Aspen didn’t give him a chance to strangle Raven. She drove the knife Raven had given her through the creature’s back and into its dark heart, killing it. The young man who had been the lycan collapsed on top of Raven and she pushed him off, kicking him aside with one boot and trying to not to acknowledge the surprised look on the once handsome young man’s face.

  “Thanks, Aspen,” Raven said.

  “I knew you had it covered, but we’re burning daylight,” Aspen replied with a grin.

  Raven made a face at Aspen and climbed back to her feet, pulling the longer knife from the small of her back.

  “Where are you going?” Aspen asked.

  “Those lycans,” Raven replied. “I used the obsidian arrows not the silver ones I made in camp.”

  Aspen blinked. “You mean they’re not dead?”

  “They are. They just haven’t stopped breathing yet,” Raven said.

  She dropped into the pit and approached the bodies as quietly as she could. With great care she slipped the blade into each lycan’s heart, listening to them revert to human as she continued from one to the next. When she was through she whistled softly and Aspen appeared at the edge of the pit. Raven waved her down and watched as Aspen descended the nearest ladder and joined her near the remains of the dead woman.

  “Do you recognize her?” Raven asked.

  Aspen cocked her head and looked more closely at what was left of the woman.

  “Isn’t that Xavier’s familiar Dierdre?”

  “I think so,” Raven said. “I thought all his followers had fled after the fight. It’s
not good if they’re still around. It means another bloodsucker is protecting them.”

  “Evangelina was always his lapdog,” Aspen said. “She would have taken them in just to make herself look more impressive.”

  “I didn’t know she was that involved,” Raven said. “I thought she was just another Embraced with a big ego.”

  “Look on the bright side. She’s probably one of those piles of ash we walked over,” Aspen said. “She never could fight, Xavier always had to do it for her.”

  “I’m trying not to be pissed that you know that,” Raven said, turning to look at the weapons on the wall.

  Aspen stepped in front of her. “Ray… you know that wasn’t my fault and I did all I could to help you. Not every vampire is as nice as you are to their familiars. He knew almost everything I was doing. You could too if you really wanted to.”

  Raven looked at the purple-haired girl in front of her. “I know, Aspen. I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at my bottom-feeding brother. He used you to get to me. An innocent was hurt because of me and there was nothing I could do to keep it from happening.”

  “No. But you did the next best thing,” Aspen said.

  Raven arched an eyebrow. “I did?”

  Aspen looked down, violet locks falling in her eyes. “Yep. You stopped him. You killed him and instead of leaving me to whatever bloodsucker came along next you took me in even after all I’d done to you and Rupert. You protected me when no one else would have. Your mom would have fed me to the blood-starved forsaken if not for you.”

  “None of it was your fault,” Raven said. “Besides, I’d grown kind of attached to you by then.”

  Aspen opened her mouth to reply but was interrupted by a melodious voice from above.

  “Well isn’t this touching. The turncoat and the Mistress’ flunky,” Evangelina said. “And such a perfect disgusting place to find you. Blood suits you, Fürstin Ravenel…”