as did Stone. Stone was the second-in-command of the squad. He was just as tall as Morg but much more skinny, with thick hair and a short beard. Both of their black fatigues and armor jackets were stained with forest slime. Their boots were covered in mud, and Cross noticed that Stone’s left hand had some gashes on the knuckles.
“ Are you all right?” he asked, and Stone nodded.
“ Yeah. Did we sneak up on you?”
“ You snuck up on them,” Graves said with a nod toward the mages.
“ Winter?” Morg asked quietly. Graves shook his head, and Morg nodded. “Any other trouble?”
“ Just the Shadowclaws. Snow is tracking them now.”
“ Don’t bother, we know where they are,” Morg said. His baritone voice felt unnaturally loud in the still air. “There’s a structure half a klick to the west. The suck-heads went that way.”
“ How many?” Graves asked. Kray helped him bandage his wound now that Cross had leeched away the poison. Graves didn’t seem too bothered by the fact that a needle had pushed all of the way through his arm.
“ Two Creeds,” Stone said.
“ Wow,” Graves said with a shake of his head. Cross smelled Graves’ strange and sharp-flavored organic chewing tobacco. He wished he had a cigarillo.
“ We may not be properly equipped to deal with that many vampires,” Cross said, and while Kray nodded and Snow’s eyes grew wide, he got the response he expected from the others.
“ Are you scared?” Stone smiled. Morgan and Graves just laughed, and started towards the structure.
The Wormwood was a graveyard. Long moldering tree limbs sank into the thick black churn like languid serpents, piles of bones lay in drifts of dark silt and creamy mud, and stones and bricks and dead leaves lay scattered like casualties. The squad saw corner block foundations of old buildings covered with moss, weeds and slime. Vines crept out of the dismal waters. Statues, street signs and mailboxes stood half-out of the mud. Cross saw the remains of a car covered in fungus and overgrowth, and bits of a street that had been swallowed up by the forest. The entire Wormwood smelled like an old garbage can or the inside of a stomach. Churning acid, bad eggs and stale milk all combined to form a bitter and gagging cloud of largely invisible vapors.
The silence was unnerving. Cross didn’t hear so much as a mosquito. There was nothing alive in the Wormwood — nothing natural, at least — and all they heard as they slowly trudged through the murk was the sound of their own boots as they sank and pulled out of the briny black sewage.
Snow floated just above the ground. Morg, Stone, Graves and Kray walked a defensive perimeter around her and Cross. Cross initially objected, but Morg insisted both mages stay protected, especially since Cross was now the lone warlock in the party. Guns and alchemy bombs would carry them for a while, but without arcane spirits on their side humans wouldn’t have lasted more than a year or two against the vampires, and less than that against more powerful enemies like the Cruj or the Sorn. Cross’ stomach was going haywire. He’d been in areas and situations like this before — the worst had been the catacombs beneath Glaive — but the stakes had never been this high.
And you’ve never had to worry about whether or not your sister was going to make it out alive.
Cross had once met the woman they now hunted, face to face. Red, they called her, but her real name was Margrave Azazeth. She’d been a hero, one of the most powerful witches who ever lived, and after she’d achieved a role of leadership she’d helped to lead humankind into a new age, an age of survival. She’d been the voice of the White Mother, and the champion of Thornn and the Southern Claw.
And now, she’s turned on us. She’s stolen something, something vital, and we have to stop her from giving it to the Old One.
And so there they were, ankle-deep in sludge, their senior member dead, and all of them intent on killing a woman who not long before had been considered one of the best and brightest of the Southern Claw. Cross thought back to his youth — he’d been doing that a lot lately, in spite of himself — and he remembered chasing after his mother after she’d run away, when she’d been unable to deal with the reality that her son had supernatural powers. Snow had been an infant then, not old enough to understand why mommy had lost her mind, or how she and her big brother would be treated like dangerous animals for the rest of their lives. He wasn’t sure why he thought about that now.
“ There,” Stone said quietly. He was soft spoken for such a tall man. The squad moved carefully, but they were fast and quiet, and they carried themselves with the precision of hunter cats.
I’m not one of them, Cross thought. I’m not a soldier. I’m just a weapon. All of us are, me and Snow both, and Winter, and Chalmers, and all of the witches and warlocks. They’re afraid of us. I’m afraid of us.
Stone pointed out a well camouflaged stone structure that Cross would have looked right past if it hadn’t been shown to him. The stone building was covered with so much moss it looked like a massive tree stump. Cross thought it might have once stood taller and been some sort of obelisk or pillar, but the upper sections had long since toppled into the swamp. The ruin stood on the shore of a small island that was maybe forty feet across. The island, in turn, stood in the center of a shallow and murky lake. Twisted branches and bubbles of oil and grease floated along the surface of the water.
Bits of stone were visible through the moss, sections of a fallen monolith covered with images of angels and eyes. A twisted metal gate had been ripped from the main door, and as they drew close Cross realized that the structure was the partially crushed remains of a mausoleum. A film of dark slime rendered the crypt nearly invisible, and the roof had partially collapsed. There was no sign of what might have crushed the structure, but Cross got the eerie impression that something massive had stepped on it.
“ Yes,” Snow confirmed quietly. Her voice took on a hollow quality. It wasn’t really her, but her spirit as it spoke through her, using her as a medium, even though Snow was the one really in control. She used her spirit to analyze the dweomer lines and to read between the reality folds as she searched for the absence, the void that would tell them that undead were there. Her finger reached, outstretched, towards the building.
“ The suck-heads are there?” Kray asked grimly.
“ We saw them head toward it,” Stone said. He slung his rifle over his back and procured a 9mm Beretta with dragons carved into the hilt.
“ What about her?” Cross asked. He and Stone both looked back at Snow.
“ What about Red?” Graves repeated.
Snow hovered in place. Cross found the effect of his sister levitating mere inches above the face of the marsh unnerving. Only witches could do that, and only those blessed with the ability to read the lines of shadow and ether, which somehow snaked their smoky tendrils out of the shadow world to lift a witch aloft. She floated there, her head held back, her back arched, her eyes blank and staring not at the physical world but at some striated arcane patterns and whorls that only she could see. She was ominous and aimless in the cold embrace of her spirit. In that state, she saw only what her spirit showed her, or chose to show her. That was a notion that was very frightening to apprentice mages — that their spirit might actually be in control, and that a witch or a warlock was at their mercy.
Snow was lost in concentration. Everyone rechecked their weapons and looked ready to move on, regardless of what Snow had to say, when at last she spoke.
“ Yes. Oh my God, yes, she’s there, I can sense her!”
“ Move,” Morg said, and without another word they converged on the mausoleum.
The squad was forced to move slow through the murky water, and soon they were waist deep in warm slime and effluvia. Cross got a good view into the structure as they drew near, but what he saw was only a foyer. There was a broken staircase made of ancient and crumbling stone that was just barely visible through the gaps in the collapsing outer shell of the structure. Cross’ blood went cold at the thought of where those stairs might lead.
“ How did something like that even get here?” Graves grumbled quietly.
“ It was here before the forest was, genius,” Kray growled, his sword at the ready. He was the soldier closest to Snow, and Cross knew he’d take protect her with his life. Truth be told, Cross figured Kray was a better choice to protect her than he was. “The forest came later. It buried whatever was here before. Everyone knows that.”
“ Wow, Kray knew something I didn’t,” Graves smiled. “That officially makes me the dumbest man on the planet…”
“ Yes, it does,” Morg growled, with a tone that made his mood clear. “Keep talking, and we’re all dead.” The look he shot Graves would have sent a lot of people running. Morg glowered at them all for a moment, then took up his spear and carried on.
Cross was close to Graves, and whispered.
