Winter fell to the ground, blood pouring from an open cavity in his skull.
Razor projectiles came at them with deadly accuracy. Cross crafted a shield of air in front of him and barely deflected bone needles intended for he and Snow. They both dropped to the ground.
Graves was down. Cross saw a nine-inch bone nail lodged in his friend’s left arm, glistening with blood. Shots rang through the trees. Cross fired into the darkness, a distraction while he held the shield and pulled in more of his spirit, focused her raw form into his fist and held her there, crackling, a dissolving ball of corrosive cold that dripped like oil between his fingers.
“ Graves?!” he called out.
“ I’m okay,” he grunted.
“ I think Winter is dead,” Cross said quietly.
He felt Snow’s vision as she scanned the trees for the vampires, as she reached out with keen senses and probed the limbs and clearings and watery pockets, the open holes in the dense thicket, searching for what wasn’t there. Vampires gave off an entirely different energy signature than a living being: they bore no souls, but they could be located through that absence, by the void silhouette they left behind them as they moved through the world. It was doubly difficult for her to find them right then, of course, thanks to the barrage of bone needles being launched at them from the darkness of the forest.
“ Down!” Cross shouted. He focused his thoughts and breathed icy vapors into his sweaty palm. He lobbed the cold grenade into the trees, guiding it as best he could through the will of his spirit. The explosion shook the ground and sent out a wave of deathly ice that even from a hundred yards away licked against them with a chill arctic wind.
The shooting stopped. Cross looked up. Dozens of bone needles stuck out of the trees like quills, and they dripped cold white fluid from the tips of their spines.
“ Damn,” Graves said. Cross moved over to him, staying low. He clamped his gauntlet around Graves’ arm and channeled raw magic into him, hoping to quickly burn out whatever poison or narcotic the needles had been coated with before anything spread through Graves’ bloodstream. Cross felt a nervous sensation along the back of his neck, like something was about to reach out and grab him from behind.
A rifle shot and a dull explosion sounded in the distance. Moments later, Cross saw a cloud of white and yellow smoke deep in the shadowy murk.
“ There they are,” Graves said. His breaths were shallow, but Cross hoped it was the sudden flux of arcane energies being poured into him, rather than his body reacting to poison.
Cross remembered getting stung by a pair of wasps one after the other when he’d been a boy, only those wasps had been tainted by the energies of the Bone March. Drogan, an old warlock shaman, had spent days trying to heal him. Cross remembered Drogan’s grim and hollow eyes and the smell of ghosts on his breath.
That was the day I learned I was a warlock.
“ Snow, are you okay?” Cross called out. He felt the touch of her mind, the will of the spirit that circled around her like a controlled whirlwind. Snow lay on her chest, her head tucked under her arms, as if waiting for something to fall on her. She still focused on scanning the area ahead. “Snow!?”
“ I’m fine,” she replied.
“ Kray?”
“ Yeah.” The big man lumbered into view. Kray hadn’t had time to pull out the mini-gun, so he instead had his sword drawn, a heavy black-bladed saber with a cord set in the hilt and white gashes carved into the blade to display Kray’s number of kills. Cross never understood that practice: he thought keeping tally of how many things you destroyed was just asking for trouble. “I thought there was something moving there in the trees, but it never got closer than fifty yards.” With Kray being such an enormous man, for some reason Cross used to assume that also meant he was stupid. Far from it, Kray probably possessed the best tactical mind in the Squad besides Morg.
“ Can you check Winter?” Cross asked him.
“ Am I going to live, or what?” Graves snapped at him. Cross felt how clammy Graves’ arm was even through the leather and cloth of his shirt. “Morg and Stone are out there alone, for God’s sake, and we need to get to them.”
“ Winter is gone,” Kray said from the trees. “Not sure what hit him. Some kind of projectile took him in the head.”
“ Crap,” Cross sighed. His stomach went sour. He’d known Winter for a good, long time. They weren’t close friends, by any means, but they’d served together for some time, and knowing somebody for that long, being around them and being used to seeing them every day, depending on them, learning from them, talking about things that others couldn’t understand, and now he was gone…
Not now, his own voice told him. You don’t have time for this.
Snow sat up.
“ I’m sorry,” she said. She’d known Winter for a long time, as well, but not as long as Cross had.
“ Kray,” Cross said, “can you get his gear?”
“ Cross?” Graves demanded. “Am I dying or not?”
“ You should be fine,” Cross said, and he unhanded Graves’ arm and drew his spirit back into an orbit about him. She circled him uneasily, like a murder of ethereal crows.
“ Then let’s go,” Graves said, and without another word he rose, reloaded the shotgun, and set off into the trees. Kray followed, hacking noxious tree limbs out of his path with his oversized blade. He dropped Winter’s belt pouch in front of Cross.
Cross felt a shudder in the air, and his spirit bristled. Winter’s spirit had moved on, no longer tied to the physical world now that its mortal tether had been removed.
Snow came and stood next to him.
“ I found Morg and Stone, and I think I found the vampires,” she said. Cross looked at her. She was only barely holding herself together. Her lip trembled, and only the thick shadows and grime on her face hid the tears in her eyes. Cross wondered if he looked as scared as she did.
“ Let’s go, then,” he said. He took the pouch, stuffed it into his coat and stood up. “They may be in trouble.”
“ Are you all right?” she asked, moving in his way as he made to go. Cross watched her for a moment.
What the hell are you doing here? he wondered. What am I doing here? He still couldn’t look at Snow without seeing a little girl. He couldn’t look at her without seeing his baby sister, and all he wanted to do was get her out of there, to get her away from that vile place as fast as they could…but no. No. This is where we are. This is where we need to be.
“ I’m fine,” he said, knowing she could see the lie on his face. You have to lie, he wanted to tell her. You have to lie to yourself, tell yourself everything is fine, tell yourself that you don’t care. If you don’t, you won’t last a day, and that’s why I have to lie to you now, even though you know I’m doing it. “Let’s go,” was all he said aloud, and they went deeper into the trees, towards the black noise that waited for them there.
I am not afraid, he told himself, hoping that if he repeated it enough he’d eventually believe it. I am not afraid.
EIGHT
It didn’t take them long to find Morg and Stone.
Cross’ frost grenade left behind a flat and icy clearing. The marsh water was covered in a film of ice, and most of the dangling tree limbs had fallen away like oversized icicles. Chunks of partially frozen meat and bits of red armor and cloth lay on the ground around the gore-spattered remains of a pale-skinned vampire torso.
“ Nice shot,” Graves said quietly.
“ Lucky shot,” Cross corrected.
“ Yes, lucky shot,” Morg said out of nowhere. His voice made both Cross and Snow jump. Morg held a M4A2,
