His eyes smoked. Black blood oozed from his nose and ears. He sent his power through his left hand, which he thrust forward without thinking. He screamed.
He watched the hound unfold, saw it split the seconds, saw it divide time around its body in a razor field and use those shards as a shield, a slipstream it navigated in order to escape harm. Cross targeted the folds, not the beast — the splits in the shields, the chinks in the moments. He cast thorns of black force captured from the beast’s own smoking body back into its dark hide. He assaulted shadow with shadow.
The act of using that necrotic power, of channeling without the aid of an implement, nearly tore him apart.
The beast folded in on itself. Cross saw only a vague flash of scenes — screaming, burning, flailing, thrashing against that black power. He held his spirit at bay. She could lend him strength to fight the necrotic assault to his system, but not fight it for him. Despite the pain and dizziness, he managed to hold onto that thought, that command.
I lost you once, and I won’t let it happen again. You nearly destroyed yourself protecting me last time. This time, let me survive on my own.
He dreams of the silver glade beneath the black mountain. He sees no one there this time but himself. Even in pain and disorientation he screams at the memory of having seen Snow and being unable to rescue her.
Cross floated through seas of pain. He slept on a bed of thorns. Hurt attacked him from all directions, and it crawled over his skin like spiders. He felt his blood burn beneath his skin. He felt things inside him, black insects, dark beetles, painful and angry, and they burrowed straight through to his soul.
At least I got to hold you again, he thought, before we died.
EIGHTEEN
He dreamed of a white spider. When he woke, Cross couldn’t feel his left hand.
It was well past dark when he finally came to. Cross was relieved when he realized they were no longer in the forest, but had instead camped on a steep and solitary hill that overlooked a rocky plain at the edge of the cold desert. Irregular stones and patches of brackish water dotted the landscape. The moon hung low in the sky, cold and dead. A massive shadow lay on the land to the north, a gulf so impossibly deep it seemed to suck in the moonlight: the Carrion Rift.
Cross sat up. His left hand was fitted in the old training gauntlet that he’d carried in his pack, a leather and steel glove set with numerous iron nodes that could connect to a portable battery pack. The gauntlet had safeguards and dampening fields much stronger than what Cross was accustomed to working with. It was meant for novices who needed help keeping their spirits contained, and while Cross had once relied on it, he now only carried it as a spare.
Now that gauntlet was bound tightly around his damaged hand, and made it heavy. He watched the fingers of the glove flex and bend as he willed them to, but he might as well have been watching someone else doing it, as he felt nothing beyond his burning wrist.
Graves was on watch, and he stared out over the moonlit flats with the M4A2 in his hands. Cristena and Stone sat near the campfire, nursing bowls of something that would pass for steaming hot soup.
“ Can I have some?” Cross croaked out. His voice sounded like he’d been breathing factory fumes.
Cristena slowly walked over to him. Stone gave him a surprisingly friendly nod.
“ Good to have you back,” he said.
“ You crazy bastard,” Graves added.
Cristena knelt down beside him. She was still very pale, and the dark lines under her eyes and the creases on her face made her look like a woman twenty years older who hadn’t slept for days, but still she smiled. She looked at his gauntleted hand.
“ How do you feel?” she asked.
“ Like hell,” he said. “I imagine I look great, too.”
“ Spectacular,” she said with a smile. “I’m glad you’re back.” She paused, as if uncertain what to say next. “Thank you.”
“ For what?”
“ For saving my life.”
“ Thank you for saving mine,” he said with an awkward nod. He held up the gauntleted hand for inspection. “Is this what I think it is?”
Cristena just nodded.
Well, damn.
Warlocks were forced to rely on arcane implements in order to properly manifest the power of their spirits. The implements could take the form of gauntlets, rods, rings, even specially modified pistols or blades. Witches, on the other hand, had no use for them. No one had ever really been able to figure out why that was the case, just as no one really knew why only women could be trackers, or why a witch’s spirit manipulated existing matter while a warlock’s spirit formed matter out of nothing. Whatever the reason, a warlock who channeled without an implement to protect him from the touch of his spirit’s raw power was just asking for trouble. At best, he’d do physical harm to himself. At worse, he’d burn both he and his spirit to a crisp.
“ I’m not sure what’s on your hand, exactly,” Cristena said. “Some sort of…necrotic bacteria. It was emitting an incredible amount of magic.”
“ I know,” Cross said. “It’s what that stupid hound was made of. I took pieces of the hound’s body, sort of reshaped them, and used them as a weapon against it. I killed the hound with…pieces of itself.” He smiled weakly. “Cool, huh?”
“ Stupid,” Graves said. Cross looked in his direction, but he didn’t feel like answering.
“ The gauntlet is holding the necrosis in check, keeping it from spreading,” Cristena explained. “I wouldn’t recommend taking it off until we get you to a healer, or to a good hospital. It would start to eat you again.” She swallowed. “And I think it would spread really fast. Even if it wasn’t a bacteria, releasing that much pent up magic…”
“ Would suck,” Cross finished. It would turn me into jerky is what it would do.
“ Man, what the hell were you thinking?” Graves looked at Cross in anger. “You piss and moan because you’ve lost your spirit, so as soon as you get her back the first thing you do is try to get yourself killed. What the hell?”
“ Graves!” Stone barked.
“ Oh, screw you!” Graves shouted back, and Stone leapt to his feet. He did that in spite of a broken rib, which was probably why Graves backed away from him.
“ I didn’t have time for anything else.” Cross stood up. It took a moment for the dizziness to subside. “I’m sorry, all right? But I wasn’t about to let Cristena die,” he said. “I killed it, didn’t I?” He looked at Graves. “Didn’t I?”
Graves shook his head, and turned his eyes back to the plain.
“ How close are we to Rhaine?” Cross asked.
“ Not far,” Cristena answered.
“ Half a day,” Stone added. He brought a bowl of steaming brown soup over from the fire and offered it to Cross. “You did good,” he said. “We’ll see if we can’t get you fixed up in Rhaine.” Stone glanced at Graves. Graves stepped over the edge of the ridge and moved a few paces down the hillside. “I don’t know what his problem is,” Stone said.
“ He’s tired of watching his friends die,” Cross said quietly.
“ We’re all tired of watching friends die. It doesn’t make him special.”
“ Well,” Cristena said, “it doesn’t make it easy, either.”
Stone shook his head and went back to the fire. Cristena waited for a moment, made sure Cross was all right, and then she went too.
