Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4)

by Steven Montano

  Ronan was quiet for a moment.

  “Let’s just do what we have to do.”

  “And what if Burke tries to screw us over? Or Jade?”

  Ronan looked back into the room.

  “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.” He turned and walked back towards the meeting chamber. “Heads up,” he said quietly as he went.

  Kane turned and saw Jade approach him with a smile on her face. He didn’t want to trust her. Her disarming personality was just a way of getting him to lower his guard, and he knew it. He hated that he found himself liking her, wanting to talk to her. But he couldn’t take his eyes off her: she was radiant, even in grungy and weather-worn fatigues, even with her long dark hair disheveled and wild-looking, even though he knew her interest in him only extended so far as making sure that Klos Vago got what he wanted.

  Get your head together.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Kane bit back a scathing reply.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You’ve been acting a little strange since you came back. And you’re acting strange now.”

  “I wonder why?” Kane said coldly. “Could it be because a guy who was personally responsible for most of my pain and suffering in Black Scar is standing thirty feet away and calling the shots? Could it be because my two best friends are in danger, and all I can do is hope that one of my so-called allies isn’t going to screw me over at the first convenient moment? Or could it be that I’m just sick and tired of being used and pushed around?!”

  He turned away. Rage swelled in his veins. Jade didn’t say anything.

  “Why are you still here?” he asked. “What could your boss possibly have to gain by you staying involved in all of this?”

  “Maybe I’m not here for my boss anymore,” she said.

  “And Sol?”

  “He doesn’t care. He just wants to fight.”

  Kane laughed.

  “I want to trust you,” he said. “You know that, right? But I can’t.” He clenched his fists. “Not with so much at stake.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jade said after a moment. Her voice wasn’t angry or apologetic; it wasn’t sad or dismissive. Just a statement of fact.

  Kane turned, but she’d already walked away. He looked back out the window and thought about Ekko.

  FIFTEEN

  GAUNTLET

  Danica marched down one of the corridors that led to the Gauntlet. Two Revengers named Parker and Creel followed her with their rifles aimed at her back.

  She knew she was about to die.

  She’d never expected to be walking down this bloodstained metal hall. Fear gripped her chest. She felt like she’d swallowed something hard.

  Danica’s legs were sore, and her skin was covered with grime. She hadn’t eaten properly for days, so she was listless and weak. Her muscles were stiff, her heart raced, and the scent of her own sweat and stench filled her nostrils.

  I should have known it would end like this, she told herself. It’s no less than I deserve.

  She tried not to think about the crimes she’d committed as a Revenger. It was just too much. She’s spent the past two years having nightmares about murders and executions and condemning people to die by fire or starvation. Some nights she woke up screaming.

  Danica would never forgive herself. Not ever. She could never wash that much blood from her hands.

  I’m sorry, Lara. I’m sorry, Eric.

  The hallway seemed to go on forever. She heard muffled shouts in the distance, the calls of the other prisoners who’d been assembled as a captive audience. They didn’t cheer so much out of excitement, she thought, as they did for the fact that at that moment they weren’t the ones suffering.

  Doors covered with the grim visages of gargoyles peeled open ahead of her. They weren’t the true entrance to the Gauntlet, not yet – there was one more hall to pass through, where she’d be given the equipment she needed for the competition.

  Danica had helped test the Gauntlet when Rake had first come up with the idea a few years back. Rather than traditional gladiator games like those held in the Ebon Cities, the Gauntlet was a sort of elite sporting event, a survival challenge that pitted high-profile or exotic prisoners against one another for the amusement of the Wardens, the prison population, and occasionally even outside spectators, dignitaries or ambassadors or other high-paying clients who wanted to see inmates they’d had interred in the prison suffer a dramatically gruesome fate.

  There was never more than one survivor from any given event, and often there were none. The contests were never the same. In the past she’d seen monsters hunt down prisoners fleeing for the exit, or airships filled with Revenger snipers who tried to shoot the inmates as they fled across a trap-riddled floor. Rake personally redesigned the course every few weeks, and work crews were pushed to the brink of death to make the necessary modifications.

  Danica didn’t worry about what she’d face. She’d resolved herself to the fact that she wasn’t going to survive. She was far more worried about Cole, and Cross. She’d failed Lara as a lover, and she’d failed Cross as a friend.

  I betrayed them both while trying to save them.

  Her blood ran cold. Every breath went down hard. She tried to comfort herself thinking about the good times she’d had with Cole. She remembered Cross and Kane, how those two had saved her, how she’d felt alive again with the team, a part of something, needed and wanted by others.

  Those memories were what she’d take with her into the Gauntlet, and they’d give her strength. She knew she was going to die, but there was no way she was going down without a fight.

  Danica held her head high. Her boots clacked loudly in the stone hall. The iron cuffs around her wrists seemed to grow lighter. She took deep and calming breaths.

  It’s going to be okay.

  She kept telling herself that. It didn’t matter that she knew it wasn’t true.

  Danica walked through the open doors and into a hall of the dead.

  The corridor was pale stone covered with blood stains, claw marks and sharp metal debris. Blazing white torches set in high wall sconces lit the way. The charnel stench was thick.

  Two rows of animated corpses stood at attention on either side of the hall. They were Scarecrows, gaunt and preposterously tall. Their dead black skin was pulled taut over misshapen and elongated bones. They turned and regarded her with dull white eyes and grinning skeletal mouths. Revenger armor covered their emaciated bodies. Each Scarecrow was identical to the next. Their corpse eyes watched as she was pushed into the hall.

  Parker and Creel left her there. The doors sealed shut behind her, barring the way back.

  Danica walked the length of the corridor, between the rows of undead. She stepped through sticky clumps of drying blood and old bones and kept her head low. The Scarecrows watched her pass. She heard the creak of leather and dead flesh. Her breaths echoed against the cold stone.

  Danica expected one of the heavy blades to come crashing down on her back, or for one of those ridiculously long arms to reach out and grab her. Their height was terrifying. She felt as if she walked through a forest of rotting flesh.

  Nothing happened. She made it to the end of the hall. She felt her spirit in the distance, a murmuring echo, a sad memory. He was still restrained. She hadn’t thought Fades were so powerful.

  They must have given me Narcosm, after all.

  A door made of brass and copper stood at the end of the corridor. Her handcuffs opened on their own accord and clattered to the floor. A simple steel helmet and a pair of black gloves had been left on a short stone pedestal by the door. Bleeding vines wrapped their way up the walls. Danica smelled blood and sap.

  She gathered up the equipment. A crowd roared on the other side of the door. She could only guess that her opponents had already started to file into the arena.

  Danica stood at the door and waited. She was shaking all over, and she felt like a piece of metal had caught in her chest. She didn�
�t want to see what waited for her on the other side.

  It’s going to be okay.

  “Screw it.”

  She opened the door. Floodlights nearly blinded her. Prisoners atop the walls roared with approval as Danica walked through the door. She smelled fuel and felt the burn of vehicular fumes. The roar of engines rattled the ground.

  The underground arena housed a massive racetrack made of scorched earth and sharp granite. Bridges, canyons and dark pillars stood in the distance. The track sat in a giant bowl of black rock with a low wall around the rim. The staging area was elevated above the track itself, which dipped down to a shallow valley filled with smoke, flames and jagged stones. The behemoth cavern of Black Scar prison hung overhead, a permanent underground night.

  “You like it?” Rake asked.

  He, Burke and Raven stood on a large iron platform that hovered some twenty feet above the floor. Steam and smoke billowed from its turbine engines. A number of small land vehicles had been spread out across the staging area directly ahead of Danica.

  “It’s real fancy,” she told Rake.

  “Burke thought you’d like it, since you were at a race when we nabbed your cute little ass.”

  “Is there a point to this conversation?” Danica shouted up to him. “Aside from you getting to act like a dick?”

  “We have time to kill,” Rake said offhandedly. He spoke quietly, but she heard his voice clearly in spite of the noise. Sometimes it was easy to forget that he was a warlock. He held such utter control over his spirit that it never so much as shifted or even made its presence known without his approval. Danica could only barely detect her now, a slithering whisper lost in the din of background noise. “I’m really disappointed in you, Danica,” he said. “You’re a whore. Did you know that?”

  “Am I?” she laughed. “And how is that?”

  “Because you had to go and sleep with the enemy,” he said coldly. “You had to put your chips in with the Southern Claw…and with that warlock.” The platform lowered till it nearly touched the ground. The exhaust blew dark dust everywhere. Danica stood firm.

  The platform hovered closer. It could have knocked her down had they wanted it to. Rake stood with his arms crossed; he was just a few feet away. Danica pictured herself using her helmet as a weapon and bashing in his skull, but she knew he and Raven were just waiting for her to try something.

  “You know you’re going to die, right, Dani?” he said. “I just want you to know that your friends are all going to die, too. I’ll see to it myself.”

  She gave him a cold look. He just smiled. The platform rose back into the air.

  Black watched them ascend. Hatred burned in her heart.

  The other contestants in the race were among the luminaries of Black Scar prison. They’d all been there for a good stretch of time and had all served time under Danica’s watch, which was undoubtedly why Rake had selected them.

  All of the racers wore matching black leather body armor. They were forced to change out there in the open, much to Black’s chagrin, and the hoot and holler of the prisoners up above was punctuated by a number of rape threats.

  Danica ignored them. She had purpose now: to make Rake pay. Her earlier resignation to her fate had dissolved.

  One way or another, I’m living through this.

  Markos and Cassandra were siblings from the Reach who’d once been part of a roaming band of marauders that preyed on settlers and workers in the borderlands. Both of them were blonde-haired, pale and tall, and they bore matching blood scar tattoos on the right sides of their faces.

  Jorgolon Creel, aka “Jorgo the Red”, was a muscular serial killer who’d slaughtered fourteen people in the city-state of Ath. He’d skinned his victims and used the hides to build a ship he believed would carry him to safety when the world flooded.

  Vance Creyzak was a Vuul mercenary who did jobs for the Ebon Cities scouting human settlements and military outposts. The grey-fleshed maniac had a reputation for being a vicious hand-to-hand combatant and had an unsavory taste for human females, who rarely survived his attentions.

  The racers present were each given their choice of vehicle. The first person who completed the race circuit, which looped down into the valley and back again, would be allowed to live. They were, of course, given full reign to kill each other during the race, though no weapons were provided. Danica knew that probably wouldn’t happen until the race started.

  Danica selected a bladed motorcycle, a modified Tiger 800XC, the same model she and Lara used to ride around on. Steel armor plates had been welded to the front and sides, and the wheels were reinforced with metal studs and sealed with anti-puncture coagulant. Razor spines and a thaumaturgic engine powered the sleek black and red cycle.

  I must be nuts. I haven’t ridden one of these things in years.

  The twins took a dune buggy each. Jorgo requisitioned a small pickup truck with spiked ram plates and retractable chains. Creyzak took the wheel of a converted vampire war wagon that had been stripped down to its chassis, but the oversized stone and steel wheels still looked formidable enough to crush other small vehicles.

  The racers made ready to begin when a sixth contestant was pushed into the underground arena by a pair of Scarecrows.

  It was Cole.

  “You bastard!” Danica yelled up at Rake. Rake just smiled and waved.

  “Dani!” Cole shouted. Danica tried to run to her, but there was a great deal of open ground between them, much of it covered by Scarecrows armed with hand-held cannons. The grinning-skull sentries formed a wall of armored dead flesh between the women and kept them apart. Cole had already been dressed in her dark armor before they’d brought her out. She looked so small amongst the corpses.

  “Lara!” Black shouted back.

  “Time to go,” Rake shouted from above, and the racers took their positions under the careful watch of Scarecrow weapons.

  Cole was shoved into an armored orange-and-white El Camino equipped with a ram-plate. She looked at Danica. Even from a hundred yards away Danica saw the frightened tears in her eyes.

  Her pulse raced. She shook with panic.

  No. Get a hold of yourself.

  Black got on the motorcycle. Motors flared to life all around her. Exhaust and gas fumes filled the air. The vehicles were poised at the top of a dark, steep hill. The hill dipped down towards a gully that ran like a cut down the middle of a narrow and elevated mesa. That mesa, in turn, led to another hill covered with a forest of razor sharp stones. From there the track ran down to the lower level of the arena.

  Rake made a motion up above, and weapons hidden in the vehicles revealed themselves. Chainguns and blades popped out of secret compartments. The siblings discovered hand-held firearms in their dune buggies, and Jorgo lifted a morningstar out of the seat in the pickup.

  Danica searched around the motorcycle. There was nothing there – no weapons, no secret buttons or compartments.

  That piece of shit!

  Her skin grew hot. Cold wind raced against her and slipped through her fingers like a pulsing electric tide. She breathed it in, and her lungs turned to ice.

  Her spirit was back. He was weak and dazed, like he’d just woken from a deep sleep. His vaporous presence flushed her skin. She focused her mind, and with each passing breath he grew more solid. He flowed through her with pulsing liquid force. Rage burned behind her eyes and boiled in her blood.

  She readied herself. The crowd up above counted down loudly.

  “THREE!…TWO!…ONE!…”

  A booming klaxon wailed from somewhere deep in the prison and signaled the beginning of the race. Vehicles sprang to life and roared down the hill in a burst of mechanical growls. Clouds of dust kicked up behind spinning armored tires.

  The racers wasted no time getting to the violence. Creyzak’s vampire wagon launched smoking spikes sideways into Jorgo’s pickup, and Danica rained cold sparks down on the damaged truck with her spirit and finished the job. Jorgo’s vehicle only made i
t twenty feet before it exploded and buckled in a roar of blue fire. Flaming debris rolled down the hill.

  Danica raced ahead. Her heart hammered painfully against her chest. Wind rushed at her. Her spirit roared after her in a trail of spectral smoke.

  The bike launched over the side of the hill and sped down the slope towards the top of the mesa. The sound of the roaring engine filled her head, and she drove so fast the ground almost seemed to vanish beneath her. Her head felt suffocated in the tight helmet, even with the wide visor.

  She rocketed across the dark earth and dodged sharp stones and debris. Bullets tore into the ground behind her.

  Danica twisted the bike as she came to the bottom of the slope, veered sideways, and almost tipped into the gully. Chunks of mud and rock exploded everywhere as shots hammered down.

  There was only a narrow stretch of mesa top to either side of the gully. Danica was between the cleft and the cliff edge. She could see the floor of the blasted subterranean valley several hundred feet below.

  She righted the bike and followed the gully. It was about twenty feet wide and ten deep, and its interior walls were lined with barbed iron stakes. A small horde of grey-skinned zombies waited at the bottom, slathering and moaning and pushing each other’s rotting bodies out of the way in a desperate attempt to climb out.

  Markos and Cassandra’s dune buggies raced parallel to Danica on the other side of the gully. Danica looked back and saw the El Camino locked in a tight race with the vampire war wagon.

  She whipped her head forward. Up ahead, the mesa came to an abrupt end just before the forest of sharp stones.

  Cassandra vaulted her dune buggy across the gully. The armored hulk soared through the air straight towards Black’s motorcycle.

  Danica hit the brakes. The dune buggy landed awkwardly and bounced down just ahead of her, barely missing the gulf. Cassandra spun her vehicle around and raced straight at Danica. The pale woman fired her M16 at the cycle. Danica twisted her vehicle sideways and used her spirit to shield her body from the ground. Metal sparked and rained around her. Danica barely missed the dune buggy as she dodged around it.