Black Scars

by Steven Alan Montano

  Cross looked at the Sleeper, and his insides froze. Even just seeing it was like falling into the sky.

  The execution platform was being evacuated. Already most of the vampires had leapt onto Razorwings or small airships that had swept by on their way to engage the beast.

  The vampire above him brought its knee into his sternum, and Cross cried out in pain. The vampire leaned forward and pushed down with all of its weight. Cross tried to move, but the eight-inch claw embedded in his shoulder kept him flat on his back. The blade twisted and tore at the meat in his arm. Cross screamed, reached up and pulled off the creature’s mask. The wide-jawed creature smiled. Dark eyes watched the warlock with hate, and pale drool ran from its stark-white fangs and dripped onto Cross’ face. It smelled of dead animal.

  “Too quick for you,” the vampire growled as it raised its other claw. Cross brought his free hand up and smashed the ball of his fist into the vampire’s face. He got his legs up underneath his attacker and threw it off of him and onto its side. The claw tore painfully out of his shoulder.

  A horde of fliers and bone airships flew toward the Sleeper, which stood so massive it might as well have been the sky. Its inhuman howl was so loud its ripples could literally be seen as they shook the air. The entire city lurched.

  The platform collided into a building with a deafening ring of steel. Gravity fled as Cross was lifted into the air to hang weightless for a moment before he came down painfully on his chest. The air was knocked from his lungs. He felt like he’d been pitted. His entire body was a bruise, and his left arm had gone numb because of his shoulder wound.

  The platform tilted. It must have lodged into the building it struck, but it was still propelled by its arcane turbine engines, which, unable to propel the device forward, instead pushed one end of the disc higher into the sky.

  With nothing to grasp onto, Cross slid down the platform. His stomach lurched.

  Cross collided with a low set of steel poles that jutted out of the deck like quills. The impact sent sharp pain through his ribs and his back. He turned his body and propped his feet onto the poles. The ship hung at an angle that grew steeper by the moment as one end continued to climb. Vampires and consorts fell from the platform.

  Above him, the vampire sentry howled in rage. It slid down the deck with controlled speed and held its claws out like a raptor’s talons.

  Ekko came out of nowhere and tackled the vampire. Her claws took it in the throat, and as it turned to lash back at her she tore its head from its body.

  She looked at Cross. Her skin was deathly pale, and her claws were easily seven inches long in hands too large for her slender frame. Her eyes were black orbs without pupils. Her mouth was large, and lined with razor-sharp fangs.

  Cross almost felt the connection between them. His vision flashed, and for a moment he saw himself in something like a bloody heat signature through her eyes. He tasted blood in the air. For the briefest of moments, Cross gazed into the minds of the vampire collective. He recoiled at the hundreds of vampires across Krul who worked in tandem as the shadow called Dra’aalthakmar approached. The twisted and alien hive-mind of the undead nearly tore his consciousness apart.

  Not now, a voice came. Ekko’s voice. She spoke inside of him. Now we have to go.

  The platform pushed against tall Krul structures and continued to tilt: it was nearly vertical. Cross pushed his back against the floor of the platform and kept his feet on the metal bars. He felt like his body could fly into the air at any second. Ekko hung at an odd angle, with her claws stuck into the steel so that she hung like a sinuous ape.

  Krul was in chaos. Buildings shifted and folded into defensive stances. Metal shells erected like insect carapaces and lent Krul the appearance of a metropolis of iron beams. Razorwings with steel-tipped claws moved in flotillas toward the attacking shadow, and their armored vampire riders assaulted the Sleeper with nail guns and handheld bone cannons. Airships made of ossified bone and dark iron launched explosive harpoons and razor-wire nets, necrotic torpedoes and pyroclast phalanx missiles.

  Everything that was launched simply vanished into the Sleeper’s form, swallowed into its dismal midnight heart. The mass of vaguely humanoid shadow didn’t make a counterattack. It didn’t need to, when it’s very presence was destroying Krul. Arcane engines sputtered, and stopped. Razorwings were overwhelmed by the maelstrom of psychic effluvia let loose in the city, and the shock of it caused them to fall out of the sky. Chains buckled and snapped their links, which shattered into steel shards that fell like rain into the darkness of the city below.

  The air tasted like smelted iron. Cross stared into that mass of murderous shadow, and he saw oblivion.

  There, Ekko commanded. He tore his eyes away. His feet slipped, and he desperately clutched onto the pitted steel at his back. Vampire bodies dropped hundreds of feet and faded to writhing slivers before they vanished into the obscurity of the distant poison fog. Cross shook so badly it was a wonder he hadn’t fallen himself.

  Cross! Ekko yelled into his mind. Go!

  “Go?!” he shouted. His voice was hardly audible in the groaning dirge of the Sleeper. “Where?!”

  Ekko pointed. Directly below them, maybe thirty feet down, was the smaller sentry vessel with the prisoners tied to the bottom of the hull. Kane was already in the open bowl of the vehicle, locked in hand-to-hand combat with the Doj vampire. One of the females lay headless over the lip of the giant metal raft, one piloted the vehicle using some sort of console at the center of the vessel, and the third female, in spite of having lost an arm, pulled herself up from the floor of the open cockpit. She moved towards Kane’s back with her one set of claws bared.

  Ekko took hold of Cross’ arm and pulled him away from the platform, and into empty air. Cross would have protested, but all that came out was a panicked yelp.

  He and Ekko plummeted through open space. Ekko held him as they went, twisted her body under his and took the brunt of the impact when they collided loudly with the vessel below. Ekko’s mostly undead body was as hard as iron. Cross’ head hammered, and his arm felt like it was about to pull clean away from his body.

  The smaller ship listed to the side, and he heard panicked screams from the prisoners secured beneath it.

  They’d landed right next to one of the motor guns. The vampire pilot screamed and hissed at them. The other female saw them, stopped, and turned.

  Go! Ekko barked. She pushed Cross out of her way, and he barely managed to shoot out his hand and grab hold of the motor gun instead of falling over the side.

  Ekko and the one-armed vampire attacked each other with vicious claws. The pilot pulled a large-bored pistol from her holster and, with one claw still on the control panel, aimed it at Ekko.

  Cross spun the motorgun around so that its massive rotating barrels aimed inwards, at the pilot. It wouldn’t work, and he knew it. Vampire weapons were specifically encoded so that the living couldn’t use them, so that they wouldn’t activate if touched by living hands.

  But Cross was bonded to Ekko, and that seemed to be good enough.

  The gun creaked and swiveled and seemed to start firing before Cross even pulled the trigger. The rapport was ear-shattering. Thick metal bolts hammered back and forth and rocked the craft. Cross had to hold on for dear life so that he wasn’t thrown over the side. Heavy bone-and-iron nails shot out with staccato force and turned the vampire pilot’s torso into a cloud of meat. Ekko dove down as Cross swiveled the gun up and stopped firing. His hands ached from the force of the motorgun’s motion.

  The ship lurched for a moment before Ekko pulled herself away from the one-armed vampire and gained control of the vessel.

  Kane and the vampire giant fell against the lip of the open cockpit. Cross brought the weapon to bear on the other female and fired. The roar and grind of the motor gun was overwhelming. When the smoke cleared the other vampire was gone, cast over the side by nail fire.

  The male vampire snarled. It elbowed Kane in the face
and reached for Ekko. It stood just behind Ekko’s body, preventing Cross’ shot. He felt his spirit course and surge against his skin like saltwater, and he almost took hold and channeled her before he remembered that he wore no implement. He’d burn them both to cinders if he used magic now.

  Kane pulled a saber from the vampire’s belt, and in a fluid motion he hacked its arm off at the elbow. The brute turned to face Kane, and while it was distracted Ekko lobbed off its head with a swipe of her ample claws. Kane threw what was left of the vampire over the side.

  In spite of the terror in his eyes when he gazed at Ekko, Kane wrapped her tightly in his arms. Cross couldn’t hear what was said – the grind of collapsing metal and the sky-shattering call of the Sleeper drowned everything out – but she moved as if ashamed, as if she didn’t want him to see her.

  She’s not a vampire yet, he thought. Not fully.

  The air was awash with ash, smoke and gunfire. The execution platform was aflame, as was a significant portion of Krul. Failing machinery collapsed from the Sleeper’s presence, and fuel tanks exploded all across the city.

  Cross grabbed the controls. There was no visible wheel or stick, just a number of metal plates scribed with runes in High Jlantrian, the vampire language.

  Instinctively, he put his hands on the panels. The vessel immediately started to sink.

  No, Ekko told him. She seized back the controls.

  “We have to get these people off of the bottom of this damned thing!” Cross shouted.

  “There’re dead!” Kane shouted back. “What we need to do is get the hell out of here before The Nothing back there decides to eat us!”

  “We’re not leaving without Black!” Cross shouted.

  “What?” Kane shouted back. “How stupid are you? Who gives a shit about Black?!”

  “We need her,” Cross insisted. Ekko steered the vessel towards the execution barge, which had finally snapped free of the buildings and had started to level out as it sank. It lay directly in the Sleeper’s path as the shadow slowly made its way through Krul.

  They pulled weapons from the felled vampires. Kane could only use blades (of which he acquired several), which left the bone pistols, a rotating triple-barreled vampire shotgun, and some sort of necrotic whip device.

  The Sleeper was half a mile away. It loomed and poisoned the night clouds. Its eyes were utterly dead vortexes of pale fire that devoured and fell in on themselves.

  “There!”

  Cross saw Danica Black. She tried to stay low on the surface of the execution platform. She held a curved sword, but she was pinned down by a pair of vampires with rifles, who fired at her from the cover of the killing tree.

  Cross cut them apart with the motor gun. A Razorwing turned and flew toward them in a long and looping circle. Cross fired at it and drove it off. He had no doubt there would be more.

  The wind that bellowed out of the Sleeper was cold and furious and tasted like sparks. It had risen to a gale force. The small ship rocked unsteadily as Ekko lowered it towards the platform’s deck.

  “No!” Black hollered at them from below. She ran out in the open and waved her arms. “Don’t land…she’s alive! Cole is alive!”

  The skiff floated unsteady about a dozen feet over the smoking platform. The wind was so strong they felt like they’d be tossed into a building at any second. Ships moved fast all around them. They weren’t moving towards the Sleeper anymore: they fled from it.

  “Don’t land!” Black screamed. “I’ll just jump onboard!”

  She was maybe fifteen or twenty feet away, just ahead and below them. Cross moved to the edge of the vessel and aimed the vampire triple-barrel directly at her. It was incredibly heavy for such a short weapon. Vampire runes on the stock and trigger glowed softly against his skin.

  “What the shit?!” Black called out.

  “Don’t!” Cross shouted back. “No! You don’t get to act like you don’t know why I want to kill you!”

  Black took a breath, and raised her hands in surrender. Cross felt both his spirit and Ekko shudder against him, uncertain.

  The city continued to collapse around them.

  “Christ, will you just SHOOT THE BITCH?!” Kane shouted.

  “Shut up!” Cross yelled back, and he shouted to Black. “We had a deal. Assuming Cole really is alive, so far as I’m concerned…” He breathed. It was so hard to hold his fingers still. “As far as I’m concerned, we still do.” He aimed the gun at her face. He wouldn’t miss at that range, Sleeper or no Sleeper, and they both knew it. “Will you still honor that deal?”

  Black looked at him with grim and tearful eyes. He saw pain flash across her face.

  “Yes,” she shouted, desperate. “Yes!”

  Cross’ finger tensed against the trigger. He thought about Dillon, about his stupid dice and his notebook, about his sister and nephew. About that look in his eyes when he’d dangled from that stone, when he already knew that he wasn’t going to make it.

  This isn’t about him. Not right now.

  Follow and you will find.

  He eased his finger off the trigger, and lowered the gun.

  FIFTEEN

  EXODUS

  Lara Cole was alive, but only barely. The same couldn’t be said for most of the other prisoners secured to the underbelly of the hovercraft. Only two others had survived its flight: one was maimed, while the other was a frightened child.

  The vessel hovered over an open docking platform on the south end of Krul, as far from the Sleeper as they could get and still safely land. Two larger airships, both under repair, were parked on the massive roof. The sky was bruise-black, cut at the horizon by the stark and bloody red of a fresh dawn. The city around and below them was largely quiet, but occasional vessels, Razorwings and vampire sentries passed by every minute or so, forcing the small band of escapees to keep their heads down. No vampires had appeared on that roof to challenge them yet, but Kane stood near the access hatch in the floor of the rusted metal roof with a rune-covered bone sword at the ready, just in case.

  Black tended to Cole and the boy, who was no older than ten and whose name they couldn’t get out of him since he wouldn’t speak. Cross tended the maimed man, who’d lost most of his left leg at the knee, probably when the hovercraft had collided with the execution platform. His half-leg was bandaged but still bleeding, his injured face was covered with cloth, and his skin was clammy and feverish. Cross didn’t think he had long to live.

  The rest of the prisoners on the vessel had been smashed, burned or shot in the chaos. Most of their remains couldn’t even be removed from the bottom of the ship.

  Cross looked back into central Krul. The formidable vampire city, home of so much pain and fear, was in ruins. The city’s chains dangled loose into steel valleys of smog and caustic darkness. Numerous buildings had collapsed altogether, crushed beneath the weight of taller structures or brought down by the damage caused from crashed airships or dying Razorwings. The execution barge had brought down a half-dozen buildings when it fell, and Cross still thought he heard the echoes of that crash in the sticky wind.

  He held his spirit close so as to protect her from the wild spirits of the dead. There were so many of them now they were like schools of ravenous spectral fish.

  Fragments of steel and bone shards floated through the dark air like ash. The sky above Krul was filled with a churning circle of bleak cobalt clouds that were as thick as steel.

  “Are we waiting for something?” Kane said. They’d only been on the platform for a few minutes, but Cross understood Kane’s anxiety. Every second counted. The Sleeper seemed to have vanished, at least for the moment. Traces of its twisted form still lingered, a scattered black rain that drifted like a curtain.

  You’re not gone, Cross thought to it. You’re full. You ate quite a few souls today.

  His stomach tightened at the thought. Vampires didn’t have souls, which meant it was the prisoners that the Sleeper had fed on. Many had died in the chaos when the cit
y had come undone, and many more had surely died from the mere proximity of the Sleeper’s life-draining presence.

  “We’re okay for the moment,” Cross said. “At least from the Dra’aalthakmar.”

  “So all we need to worry about is the vampires,” Kane said with an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders. “Hey, no sweat! What are we worried about?”

  Kane looked at Ekko, nervously. The almost-vampire had removed herself from the others on the roof. She kept vigil on the sky with her large ebon eyes.

  “Nobody asked you, Kane,” Black said as she finished wrapping a bandage around Cole’s arm. Cole had been only barely lucid since being revived. Her jaw and one side of her head had been badly bruised, and she was emaciated to the point of being skeletal. Her lips were cracked and dry, and every time she moved her hands they shook.

  The same went for the boy, who seemed locked inside of himself with a delirious fear that made him weep. Cole, weak though she was, held the boy close.

  “What did you say?” Kane said to Black. He took a few steps closer to her. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that. I thought maybe I heard you being rude again, you bitch.”

  Black stood up. Cole put a hand out to stop her, but Black brushed it away.

  “You heard me just fine, you dumb shit,” Black said.

  “Maybe you didn’t say it with enough feeling…”

  “Stop!” Cross said, loudly. “We don’t have time for this crap. As soon as we’re ready, we have to get the hell out of here!”

  Kane and Black both stopped, but they still looked ready to pounce.

  “We?” Kane said. “No, no, no…I think you left something back there, Cross. Like maybe your brain. There is no ‘we’. Ekko and I are getting out of here. I don’t give a shit what you do. I mean…look at her! Just LOOK at Ekko!!” It was the closest thing to panic Cross had seen or heard in Kane.

  “Ekko is going to Turn, you moron,” Black barked at him. “What are you going to do then?”