“ Then do me a favor,” she said. “Kill her.” There were nearly invisible tears on her face. “Kill that bitch for me. Maybe then I’ll stop hearing Renaad’s voice every time I touch my spirit. Maybe then I’ll actually believe that he’s not out there somewhere, suffering. Maybe then I’ll be able to sleep again.”
She turned to leave, but Cross stepped out to stop her.
“ We need a tracker,” he said. “My squad…I mean, the squad that I’m in, Viper Squad, needs a tracker. I’m sure, given the circumstances…”
“ No,” Cristena said. She kept her face down. She wouldn’t say yes. He knew she wouldn’t, and she was right not to. She left without another word.
Cross sat back down and drank more coffee, wondering all the while if he shouldn’t drink something stronger. He checked the clock on the far wall, a pale and monstrous thing that looked like a ghostly whale. The briefing was at 0900. Cross had just enough time to finish his coffee, and to think about the whispers of the dead.
He watched a spider cross the floor. It was out of place there in Krugen’s, which was normally so immaculate. The spider was ashen pale, like it was made of ice, and it scurried towards the door.
Cross had lied when he’d told Snow he’d never heard their mother after she’d died.
He heard her all the time. He wasn’t sure why Snow didn’t…maybe she would in time. Hopefully Snow would get used to ignoring her, just as Cross had.
FIVE
The briefing rooms for all Southern Claw military personnel, whether Hunters or the city watch, were located in a massive old hospital that had been converted into the Thornn government headquarters. In addition to its status as a command post, the building was still a hospital, as well as a prison, a church, an arcane workshop, and as an asylum for those whose minds had succumbed to the horrors and madness of living in a world filled with the constancy of undead, magic, and post-apocalyptic abominations. The gothic structure was all tall arches and pedestals, smooth columns and bladed promenades, arched halls that were far too tall and ancient oak doors that could only be locked with sliding bolts made from log halves. The dark stone used in the construction lent the hospital an exceedingly ominous atmosphere, and the improper lighting throughout the structure made it seem like some ancient European castle.
Not exactly the feel I’d have gone for, Cross thought. He’d always hated the place, but he’d be the first to agree that it was extremely defensible. The hospital sat at the edge of the northernmost tip of the Bloodnight, a sharp and cold river than ran southwest into the freshwater Rimefang Loch. The hospital hung directly over the churning waters of the Bloodnight, and the only way to get in aside from using the heavily guarded gate was to scale one of the sheer forty-foot steel walls. Those walls were perfectly positioned to deliver generous doses of gunfire, arcane missiles and vats filled with any number of caustic substances onto intruders.
Vampires, of course, had little need to climb, but Cross knew those who’d redesigned the hospital had taken care of that, as well, through the strategic placement of warlock marksmen and carefully woven ethereal nets cast by expert trackers. Anything, living or undead, that even attempted to fly close to the hospital’s walls would be detected, incinerated and shot down. To date, not a single vampire or other undead flier had made it in.
Cross waited in the main hall, a wide chamber carved out of dark and dirty stone. The windows in the hall let in only muted light. Oversized lanterns dangled down from the vaulted ceiling. Cross stood with one boot planted against the wall behind him, nervously rubbing his fingernails together. He hadn’t shaved in days, and he imagined he looked like a ruffian. Cross was pale, tall and thin. He dressed in black fatigues and wore a heavy black armored coat that added nearly forty pounds to his weight. In spite of not having shaved, Cross’ face still felt mostly clean, since he’d never been good at growing a beard. Snow said he had a baby face, that he looked even younger than twenty-six.
His spirit swirled around him due to how agitated as he was. He’d been asked to wait while Morg and Winter conferred with some others whose identities Cross could only guess at. Based on the nature and sensitivity of their mission, Cross guessed that most of the senior officers would be in attendance, which would mean Pike, Argus, and maybe even Jericho, the ranking officer in Thornn. As far as the whereabouts of the rest of Viper Squad — Graves, Kray and Stone — Cross had no idea. As far as he knew, they were supposed to be there for the briefing along with him.
Something is wrong. The idea gnawed at him. There was so much at stake — the lives of everyone, really, and the future of not only Thornn but perhaps the entire Southern Claw Alliance. The White Mother and her advisors were taking no chances. Cross hated not knowing what was going on. He hated being kept there, waiting.
The air seemed to grow colder the longer he waited. He heard moans from the medical wing: soldiers felled in recent skirmishes, sent back to Thornn by airship to receive the best medical support in all of the Southern Claw. A dying patient screamed somewhere beyond the massive oak doors that led out of the hall. Cross wondered if it was someone he knew.
Thornn was one of the largest cities in the Southern Claw, in part because of its plentiful supply of both magical and mundane resources but also due to its stockpile of experts, whether they were arcanists, historians, engineers, doctors or scientists. After The Black, when the world was falling to pieces and scattered refugees were forced to do everything they could just to stay alive, the enigmatic creature who would later come to be known as The White Mother scoured the world. She’d searched not only for survivors, but for the right survivors: people who could help remake civilization, people whose knowledge and abilities would help carve some sort of future out of a place that had become a cesspool of nightmares, mutants and death. There was no telling how the White Mother had known who to select or how to find them, but it was a known and accepted fact that she was not human herself; rather, she was a creature that came over from another world during The Black. The White Mother was a being as formidable, as ancient and as powerful as her opposite, the Grim Father, Lord of the Ebon Cities and the enemy of all humankind.
No one ever met the White Mother. She worked through intermediaries, and left the governing and direct leadership of the Southern Claw Alliance to its own.
To people like Red.
The nearest door opened. Cross caught a glimpse of the massive hospital chamber, a vault of columns and steps and plinths, each taken up by one or more beds surrounded by sheets and curtains, surgical tables and tubes, medical engines and healing turbines, and row upon row of the injured. The hospital guests were victims of the vampires of Rath, casualties in the field skirmishes and small-scale battles that took place far to the west. Most of the wounded in those battles were sent to Ath, but when Ath’s hospitals began to run out of beds they were re- routed to Thornn. A glimpse was all it took to see why Rikeman, the head surgeon, rarely got any sleep.
Cross saw him limp into the hall. Rikeman was a gaunt man in gray fatigues who wore a thin beard and had surprisingly muscular arms. His surgical gloves were stained with blood, and he looked bone weary with exhaustion. Rikeman’s limp came from the magical brace he was forced to wear over his left leg, an uncomfortable looking hunk of cold iron set with switches, dials, gauges and heavy leather and chain straps that held it in place. Thin trails of ice-cold steam escaped from the joints of the leg brace, exhaust from the arcane engine that kept a magical disease in Rikeman’s leg stable so that it wouldn’t spread and destroy the rest of his body. Cross didn’t know how that had happened to him, and didn’t really want to.
“ Cross,” the surgeon said. “Are you feeling okay?”
“ Yeah,” he said. “Just waiting.”
“ I mean…you’re all right? No more headaches or anything like that?”
Warlocks tended to be a sickly lot — channeling one’s own spirit to produce arcane effects took a heavy toll on the body. It was a surprise when some lasted as long as they did. In the end, the ones who lived wound up something like Cross’ mentor, Winter: harnessed to bio-charged battery packs or with chemical wires hooked into their veins so that they could maintain contact with and channel magic through their spirits without burning their bodies dry. While every warlock had to channel through some sort of an implement, it wasn’t until they grew older that they needed them just to keep breathing. Luckily for Cross, he and Snow were both considered more powerful than most other mages their age. If he was lucky, he’d be able to wait a bit longer before he had to rely on his
