“ What is this place?” he asks. His voice echoes in silver notes.
“ My prison,” she says. “The place from where I watch you, guide you, protect you.” Her voice is soft, like liquid in the air, smooth and flowing. Her hair shifts in the cool wind. The light is bright, and it illuminates her white-silk body and raven hair. She floats in a pale sea.
“ How is it that I’m here?” he asks.
“ You’re not, Eric. We’re stuck. I am still weakened from saving you. We two hover at the edge of death. I am here, where I’ve always been, but I can’t reach you. Not alone.”
The wind grows stronger. Wet leaves stir, and hard rain splashes into the laggard waters. Dark shapes move in the trees. Behind him, the mountain seems to creak and groan beneath its own weight.
“ Save me,” she says. “Save all of us, before it’s too late…”
Cristena was dying. Cross felt his arms shake.
He felt his spirit’s touch there at the edge of his consciousness, like the memory of a sweet kiss.
The vampire howled and spat blood, and at that instant Cross pulled the trigger. The bullet soared into the vampire’s mouth and crashed through the back of its skull in a mass of blood, hair and bone.
The vampire hadn’t even fallen to the ground before Cross spun round and ignited the pyrojack. Hot white fire streamed around his fist. The last stone on the gauntlet cracked and launched, and a screaming incendiary missile left a trail of rancid black smoke in its wake. The arcane missile soared down the hill, maneuvered past Graves and flew straight into the wolf, where it burned and sizzled its way through fur and skin and into the beast’s heart like a vicious volcanic worm. The lupine howled as its insides exploded. Smoke and blood streamed from its mouth.
Graves battled the vampire with his machete. Cross steadied his HK45, took aim, and fired. The shot didn’t quite hit the mark — it tore the vampire’s ear off in a fine red spray — but it was enough to distract the creature long enough for Graves to behead it with a well-placed swing.
Cross looked at Stone, and feared the worst. He knelt down next to Cristena, who’d already lost a great deal of blood. Cross yanked a strip of cloth from his coat pocket and tied it gently around her neck, then pulled a pouch of hexed salt and several vials of seawater from his pack. With one hand pressed against the wound he dropped his other hand into the salt pouch and coated it before dousing it in the seawater. That done, he rubbed the mixture onto the wound, careful not to do any more harm to the damaged tissue, but if he could contain the spread of the shadowy plague in her blood then her spirit could heal her mangled flesh. The trick was to keep her alive long enough for the weakened spirit to do its work.
“ Graves!” he shouted. Cross was fairly certain he’d stemmed the flow of the infection. The trouble then would be to determine how far the disease had spread before he’d been able to stop it. “How’s Stone?”
“ Unconscious,” Graves shouted back. “And he’s banged up pretty bad.”
“ Was he bit?”
“ No. Clawed, not bit.”
“ Clawed is okay,” Cross shouted. “No one ever got turned into a vampire from being clawed.”
“ It doesn’t look okay!” Graves shouted after a moment.
I’ll have to worry about him later.
The flesh on Cristena’s face and neck was discolored and dark, like she was drowning. Her eyes were open and blank, and black spittle ran out of her open lips.
“ Graves, where’s the camel?”
They stabilized Cristena and Stone as best they could. Cross tended to them while Graves went out to search for the stalwart camel, which had wisely fled as soon as the fighting started. Thankfully, the ugly brute hadn’t gone far. While Graves was gone, Cross sat, still aware of his spirit there at the edge of his mind, a memory he couldn’t quite recapture, a taste he couldn’t quite recognize.
He thought he’d figured out how to carry on without her, but now that he felt her presence again he realized how wrong he was. Longing filled him, twisted him, quickened his pulse and pulled at his soul.
If only I could touch you again.
He focused his attention back on the wounded. Stone, as Graves had put it, was indeed banged up — there were claw wounds that ran deep into his back, and Cross was pretty certain Stone had suffered a broken rib and possibly a concussion, not to mention a twisted ankle. He’d be far from a hundred percent, but he was alive, and so long as the concussion was minor he’d be able to hold his own.
“ You always were a tough guy,” Cross laughed.
Cristena was the real worry. Cross kept trying to convince himself that she wanted to die, that maybe she wouldn’t even want to be saved, but he knew that was crazy, that he was just trying to take the pressure off of himself, and that was the last thing he needed to do. She’d saved their lives more than once, and, perhaps of greater import, she was meant to be there with them. He wholly believed that, and that was what really mattered.
Graves returned with the camel, as well as all of the equipment that Cross needed. Cross was able to extract the rest of the vampiric poison out of Cristena’s bloodstream with plastic tubing and a small electric engine made for drawing parasites out of the bloodstream; he’d taken to carrying that handy combination of devices ever since his short tour in the Blackmarsh, land of the ear mites and brain worms. The infected blood came out thick and syrupy, almost like oil, and it crawled with tiny black insects that looked like scarab beetles.
“ That,” Graves declared, “is some nasty shit.”
“ Now,” Cross answered, “we give her blood.”
Graves wasn’t particularly crazy about the tube apparatus and spider-shaped needles that Cross had to use to perform the transfusion, and he griped constantly about the pain, but in the end the three of them — Graves, Cross and Stone, who certainly couldn’t object to being a donor given his unconscious state — were able to give Cristena enough blood to keep her alive.
They made camp right there at the edge of the forest. Graves cleaned their weapons by flickering campfire light while Cross looked over the maps. Stone and Cristena lay nearby, unconscious and wrapped tightly in woolen blankets. Stone woke once or twice, just long enough to make rude comments regarding the state of the campfire and to consume an MRE before he drifted back to sleep. Cross was pretty sure he’d be okay. The concussion seemed minor, and while a broken rib was nothing to be thrilled about it could have been much worse. Once Cross and Graves cleaned and stitched his wounds and cleared away any possible infections with hexed seaweed and honeysuckle balm they knew he’d pull through.
Cristena, on the other hand, had not stirred at all.
“ Wow,” Cross said after he’d studied the maps for a while. The night air sounded normal now — there were crickets and birds, occasional owl hoots, even the wind. “We’re actually close to a town.”
“ Say what?” Graves asked.
“ A town. You know, with people, and stuff? We’re close to one.”
“ How did we manage that?” Graves had cleaned and loaded his pistols, and set about doing the same with the M16A2 and the M403. “I thought we were in the dreaded Bone March, end of the earth, last chance to get killed for four-hundred-miles, middle of friggin’ nowhere.”
“ Are you ever not bitter? In any case, you’re right, buuuut…” Cross checked the map he’d made down in the hole in the Wormwood, compared it to Cristena’s land maps, and re-took his compass reading. “Yeah. We’re close to Rhaine. It’s a borderland trading town, I think, about half a day’s ride to the northeast. It’s about as isolated as you can get for a populated area, but they’re bound to have supplies.”
“ I’ve heard of that place. A bunch of prospectors live there, mountain men, ex-soldiers, stuff like that?”
“ That’s the place.”
Graves stared off for a second, and then looked to the north.
“ You know we don’t have the time to go there, right? There’s no telling how far ahead of us Red is. Hell, she’s probably almost to Koth already. If she gets there before we get to her…”
“ She will, Sam,” Cross interrupted. “I hate to break it to you, but she’s got two people to worry about, her and Snow, and that’s assuming she even took my sister with her.” Cross had to let that cold notion settle in. His hands started to shake, but he did his best to ignore it. “We’re a whole group, complete with a camel, for God’s sake. We’re not even completely sure that we know where she’s going. Of course she’s going to beat us there.”
“ Wait a minute,” Graves said, suddenly angry, and Cross was suddenly nervous. Graves may not have been the most physically imposing man, but he had a temper like a wolverine, and he could be just as hard to deal with.
