fatigue rushed over him like a wave. He nearly slipped on the streams of blood and dark water under his feet.
The burning vampire came at him. Cross thought it had been destroyed, but even though the immolated undead smoldered with white arcane fires it ran right at him, its one remaining arm outstretched and its oversized reptilian mouth wide with hunger. Claws the size of knives raked across the stone. Cross stepped backwards and fired arrows of flame, but doing so sent him sprawling onto his back.
The fighting raged on behind him.
Cross sent a pillar of fire and stone into the brute’s body, but it just shoved its way through. It was easily the largest vampire he’d ever seen, seven-feet at the shoulder and as broad as an ape. Its knotted undead muscles pulsed with grave ooze, and cracked sinew tensed with incredible undead strength. It drew close, its eyes drawn tight and its grotesque maw open and hungry.
Graves threw himself into the brute with an armored shoulder and swiped at it with his machete. Cross seized the opportunity and sprang to his feet. He drew breath.
The vampire backhanded Graves and sent him flying. Cross cried out and released a three-foot-wide blast of fire into the vampire’s chest that pushed straight through its rotted skin.
Something struck Cross from behind. He heard something crack. The flames stopped and he tumbled forward. His spirit absorbed the force of what should have been a killing blow, but in so doing she nearly destroyed herself.
Cross lay there. Blood and sweat ran into his eyes. He was barely able to move, and he could only watch as the rest of the battle unfolded.
Morg dodged a blow from the vampire giant, and in the same fluid motion he swung his spear in a wide arc and cleaved open a different vampire’s skull. Chunks of white bone and flesh flew through the air. The giant took Morg in its grip and locked his arms back. As big as Morg was, the vampire was bigger, but Morg kicked backward and down and snapped the giant’s knee-bone backwards, buckling its weight and forcing it to the ground. Still it fought, its giant mouth wide, its arms out. Morg had been disarmed.
A blade of red light took the vampire giant in the back of the head and remained stuck there. The brute looked up and stupidly regarded the weapon that had pushed through its forehead from the back of its skull. Its arms went slack, and it finally fell forward in a thunderous heap. Snow stood there with a blade of purple and white energy firmly affixed to her gauntlet, and the force of her spirit swirled around her like a cloud of crystalline dust. Her eyes were fixed and blank.
Cross could barely move. He looked around. He heard and then saw Stone, but he didn’t see Kray or Graves.
He forced himself up, slowly and painfully. Blood streamed down the side of his head and the back of his neck, and it felt cold as it flowed under his armored coat. His left arm was numb. If not for his spirit he knew that he’d be dead. He felt her there, lingering, weakened from her prolonged activity and from having saved him from a pair of blows that should have ended his life.
Stone and a vampire fought near a mound of bodies and splayed limbs. The floor was littered with blades and shattered claws and heaps of humanoid remains.
Graves lay on the ground in a crumpled heap.
“ Sam…” Cross said. Morg ignored him, his eyes locked on something. Cross looked up.
Red was still there. She’d been blocked off from the exit by yet another Shadowclaw Creed, pale-skinned and red-armored vampires who’d been armed with saw blades and automatic weapons. She’d dealt with them. Their bodies hung from the wall, stuck there by arcane bolts of black force, spikes made of gray ice and blades wrought of translucent amber. The sheer force of Red’s spirit cascaded around her, invisible to the human eye but plain as could be to a warlock: it was a chaotic cloak, a shroud of male arcane fumes that burned like an explosive rainbow.
Morg didn’t hesitate. Surprisingly, neither did Snow. The bloodlust was on both she and her spirit. Cross struggled to rise, but he felt a sharp pain in his side, maybe a cracked rib. He reached out with his mind and breathed, tried to lasso in his spirit. She was there, barely, a fade of her normal self.
Snow shouted out, and her spirit launched himself at Red as a cyclone of shrapnel and bullet casings that left brilliant clouds of crimson dust in its wake. Morg followed Snow’s attack like a charioteer behind his steeds. He bore a serrated broadsword in his hands, and though his face was bloodied his eyes were focused. He was a human train, and he tore across the rubble and blood spattered ground. His armored boots tore chunks out of the stone.
Cross, unable to call up his ailing spirit, remembered his HK45, which had somehow found its way back into his unsteady hand.
Snow’s attack dissipated before it reached Red. The Witch’s spirit met Snow’s attack with a shimmering wall of prismatic rain, and he chewed through Snow’s magic like acid through paper.
Morg barreled his way through the chaos, howling with fury. Red focused, and in that moment, Cross fired his pistol. The shot took Red in the meat of her shoulder and pushed her back.
Red was a blur of motion. She spun with the shot, turned full circle, and lashed out with a violet wave of liquid daggers that expanded like a fan. Cross called up every last shred of his spirit’s power. He felt her scream, felt her energy fail, but he willed Snow to do the same. Static explosions of sound filled his mind. His stomach tightened, and he felt himself torn inside out.
He sees his spirit’s world. He sees her at the edge of a cold black mountain, a young girl seated near a stream. She hides in mists of silver silk. He sees bodies fall out of the pale sky, and black unicorns covered in grime and gore hunt her across that nightmare landscape, ready to rend her into pieces.
Cross tried to focus, tried to pull himself away from the sight of his dying spirit, but pain and blackness overcame him.
TEN
Cross woke some time later.
Morg was dead. His body was so covered with wounds it was almost impossible to identify him. He was a bloody road map.
Kray was dead, too, impaled on a vampire’s spiked spear.
Cross felt little. He should have. They’d been like brothers without being friends, but he’d known both of them long enough that the notion of their being dead seemed unreal. He tried to call up memories of them, specific events or conversations, but he couldn’t. They were dead and gone, and part of him had already excised them from his mind.
Stone and Graves, on the other hand, were alive. Graves was injured, but thankfully his wounds were superficial. He was battered and bruised from being thrown across the room by the giant vampire, but aside from some sore bones and numerous cuts and scrapes he’d gotten off lucky. Graves took Morg’s armored elbow brace and wore it on his right arm to secure where he felt he’d bruised the bone, but all that he really needed was rest and medical attention. Rest would have to wait, but once they got back to the airship they’d have access to some better medical supplies.
Cross wasn’t much better off himself. He was fairly certain his ribs had been bruised — one or two might have been cracked — and his head felt like glass had been shoved into his brain. He was dizzy and weak, but only part of that was from his wounds.
Where are you? Why can’t I feel you?
He tried to focus on something else.
The vampires, thankfully, had been vanquished, but Red was gone.
And so was Snow.
It was bad enough that Morg and Kray were dead, but Cross didn’t want to imagine what Red was doing to his sister. He tried to shut it out, to dispel any thought of it, but he couldn’t. He shook with rage and fear.
They pulled Morg’s and Kray’s bodies aside. Stone decapitated the bodies to prevent reanimation, and the
