“Thank you,” he said. He heard how exhausted he sounded. He was so tired.
“For what?” Danica asked.
“For being my friend,” he said.
Cold lanced up his spine. The wind ripped at them yet they felt pulled forward, like they were being sucked into a whirlpool.
“Creasy,” Danica said. She jumped to her feet to secure Ronan.
Somehow the Wolftown warlock had sent them through a shifting gate, a translocative vortex that had allowed them to span miles in the space of a heartbeat and reach Shiv in time. The thaumaturgic signature of the coming storm felt the same, a dizzying torrent of energies, eddies of hex power that stained the air.
Another portal. He wasn’t sure how it was possible, for Creasy must have been dead by now, but Cross felt his body drawn thin as everything fell apart beneath them. He called out for Danica to grab Ronan while he wrapped his arms around Shiv, and seconds later
Across black waters through scars in the sky skirting the skin of worlds dripping down along the glass face the dome cracked claws faces snarls in the moonlight darkness above and below
Slowly things take form make more sense
Floating, like sailors on an ebon sea. The glistening waters stretch on forever, never ending. Black tides carry them to a far shore. He’s weightless and afraid.
They cross seas of darkness. The coasts are dotted with bone towers and burning monoliths. Pillars of skin and walls of fog line the skull-paved roads.
The soiled landscape has been ruined by pollution and necrotic filth. Death songs trill through the atmosphere. Pale bodies walk the corrosive shore.
They go deeper inland, up rivers of blood and past cities of the dead. Black iron walls rattle in the dead wind.
They draw close to the ground at the edge of a white wasteland. Glacial cold rolls against them as they step into the shadow of a
broken city with high sandstone walls, blasted by scorch marks and powder burns. Concertina wire dangled from the towers like frayed ropes. Black smoke billowed from furnaces inside the city. Cross smelled exhaust and oil, the runoff from silenced industrial machines.
Bitter cold swept at them from across the eastern tundra. The sky was grey and dark, frozen in a bed of endless black clouds. Crusts of soiled snow crunched underfoot.
Cross immediately pulled off his armor coat and laid it across Shiv. Danica did the same for Ronan, and moments later Cross felt her spirit protect everyone from the rancid chill.
The troglodytic fortress-city looked broken: its walls were cracked and stained, its towers seemed to have fallen inwards under the stress of the elements, its battlements were unmanned and silent. Numerous dirt tracks wound up to the city from the shallow field they found themselves in, a clearing filled with broken stones. A ruined shack sat nearby, blasted apart by some destructive force, and a lone dead tree stood at the edge of a frozen stream.
There was no sign of Flint, or the downed Skyhawk, no sign of anything but the four survivors and the cold and silent wastes.
“Where are we?” Danica asked.
Cross was about to say he didn’t know when he caught sight of night-black flags rippling in the winter wind. Pale shards had been stitched into the cloth, and even from that distance he knew with certainty they were finger-bones and teeth.
Banners of the Ebon Cities.
“Shit,” he said. He turned around and took everything in. He thought he’d known where they were, but he had to be wrong. Everything tasted too dead, felt too silent. There was no sign of anything living, no sound at all aside from the merciless wind.
Cross walked over to the tree. A white apple dangled from a dead limb. Fear spread through his gut like poison.
“Thornn,” he said. His chest went tight. “We’re outside Thornn. The vampires have taken it.”
And if the visions they’d had as they’d shifted through the gate were at all accurate – the barren and twisted landscape, the desolate wastes along the coasts and rivers, the dead cities and dead skies – then it was more than just Thornn.
No. It can’t be.
But in his heart he knew it was true.
The Southern Claw had fallen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Montano keeps writing novels in the hopes that one day he’ll wake up and actually feel like a real author. Maybe it’ll happen tomorrow.
Steven is the author of the Skullborn (City of Scars), the Blood Skies novels (Blood Skies, Black Scars, Soulrazor, Crown of Ash, The Witch’s Eye and Chain of Shadows), Tales of a Blood Earth 1 and 2, and something black…. He’s currently hard at work on Blood Angel Rising, a horror novel; Vampire Down, the next installment of the Blood Skies series; and Path of Bones and The Black Tower, the conclusion to The Skullborn trilogy.
He lives in Washington State with his beautiful and intelligent wife, two beautiful and talented children, and a backyard badly in need of some love.
Visit Steven’s official website, bloodskies.com
Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) Page 33