She refused to look up.
The arms of her cloak had been torn away, displaying deep cuts and a handful of black and blue bite marks. He knew what had happened: they’d broken her. It wasn’t Red who’d done it, as he’d originally suspected, but the vampires. Snow had been a captive long enough, so they’d had plenty of time. Almost anyone subjected to their treatment would break, no matter how resolute or determined. There was only so much a human could endure, and vampires were absolute in their methods. Once a human was properly broken, there was little chance of ever coming back.
A sick feeling rose in his stomach. Try as he did to dispel images of what her torture must have been like, he couldn’t.
“ Snow!?”
“ She is not allowed to speak to you at this time,” Krannor said coolly. He turned and looked at Cross. “And you are not allowed to speak at all.”
“ Fuck you.”
Cross didn’t see the war wight until it struck. Lengthy claws reached through the bars and raked him across the chest. He gasped as both his strength and his air were sucked straight out of him. The claw wounds were deep, and they burned like he’d been cut with ice. Even his blood was cold as it ran down his stomach and across his shirt.
“ Anything else to say?” Krannor smiled.
“ Yes,” Cross managed, biting his teeth to block out the pain. “Why did Knight defect from Rath? What’s he really up to? I don’t believe that he’s trying to reconcile with the Ebon Cities. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The lich’s smile broadened. This time Cross was ready, and he pulled away from the bars moments before the war wight’s claws took him.
Cross’ victory was short lived. Krannor leapt through the bars with a dimensional folding, a translocative jump. The lich gripped Cross’ throat in a vise-like grip. He felt his windpipe being crushed. Air built up in his lungs, which he pictured filling and bursting like balloons. He had no strength with which to fight back.
“ You should learn respect,” the lich smiled.
Cross couldn’t answer. He nearly passed out before Krannor finally released him. He crashed to the ground, gasping for breath, wishing feeling back into his arms and legs.
The Old One and Red were both suddenly in the car. Cross wasn’t sure when they’d arrived.
Red held Snow in her arms like she was her long-lost daughter, and Snow set her head on Red’s shoulder and kept her eyes locked on Cross. She continued to gaze at him with hate, like he’d committed some horrible crime.
Knight’s hood was pulled back so that Cross could see the ancient vampire’s cracked ebon skin, his sunken eyes and his decaying flesh. His hands ended in jagged yellow claws shaped like a bird’s talons, and his long and forked tongue dangled out of his fanged mouth like a thrashing eel.
“ Is it…time…already?” Cross coughed. He felt the wounds on his chest freezing. The ice was working its way into his blood.
Krannor hauled Cross to his feet and held him a good foot off of the ground. Cross was brought to the edge of the cage. A terrible choir of screams bellowed from outside, and through that din Cross just made out the baying of massive hounds.
We’re near the Rift already, he thought in dismay. We’ll be in Rath by sundown tomorrow.
We must prepare you, the Old One told him without words. The vampire opened his taloned hand and revealed a dim black bulb the size of a turnip. The sphere held a spark of green flame deep in its core, like a torch buried in liquid amber. The subtle green shine radiated sickness and power. Cross didn’t need his spirit to feel the monstrous arcane potential in the bomb, far too much to all be contained in a single, small device.
That one bomb was linked to others. When it exploded, so would they.
Krannor set Cross down, and then delivered a sharp kick to the back of his leg. He screamed. He felt bones crack. Blinded with pain, Cross fell to the floor, and he would have toppled over if not for Krannor’s claw, which painfully dug into the meat of his shoulder.
Hang on, he told himself. Stay. Finish this.
A war wight took the orb from Knight and opened the cage door. The bomb glowed brighter the closer it came to Cross. He sensed the power it was linked to, felt it pulse against him like heat. Krannor pulled Cross’ head painfully back by his hair, and the wight walked towards him with the orb held level with Cross’ face.
They’re going to make me swallow it.
“ How many?” he asked. “How many of those things are there?” He didn’t actually expect an answer, but asking the questions kept him conscious. “There are more, aren’t there? You hid them all over Rath, I bet. It would have been easy to get vampire spies into a city of vampires to hide them for you, right?” No one answered.
Did I catch them off guard? he wondered. “How about the obelisk? Are any of the bombs attached to it?”
“ Wow,” Red laughed. “Shut up, you moron, before you make it worse for yourself.”
“ Worse than getting a pyroclast bomb shoved down my throat?” he shouted. “I’m the trigger, aren’t I? That’s how it’s going to work: when the vampires of Rath sacrifice me to destroy the obelisk, all of those linked explosives are going to go off at once. Am I right?” Red’s stunned face gave Cross the answer.
The war wight towered over him. Cross smelled sewage and brimstone radiate from the bomb.
“ Am I right?!” he shouted again.
Cross knew that he was about to die, and he tried to prepare himself for it, tried to draw in a heroic final breath or think a final heroic thought, but all he could think of was his spirit, and what a crime it was that he wouldn’t get to say goodbye to her.
To his immense surprise, the wight hesitated, and it stepped back. Knight shifted in place.
“ You were never going to make good with the Ebon Cities, were you?” Cross pressed. His heart pounded wildly. He felt like he was going to be sick. “You set up this whole obelisk business to get them to deal with you, but it’s a ruse. When they sacrifice me, the bombs go off, Rath will blow up, the obelisk will blow up…the Ebon Cities will lose one of their strongest cities, and in the same stroke you’ll take magic away from humans forever.”
God, he thought, it’s brilliant.
“ And you win.”
I win.
“ So…that’s it? You were one of us, God damn it! What the hell happened?”
The Old One glared at him with rotted eyes. His face was surrounded by a faint and sickly shine.
Knight hovered towards him soundlessly. His tattered cloak dragged across the rattling train floor. The car rocked and shook as the Necronaught thundered over the Carrion Rift.
What HAPPENED?!
The voice cut through Cross’ mind like a hot knife.
I. Became. This. This shell. This disease. Forever hated by both sides of this ridiculous war. I sacrificed my own life to give humankind a chance, and in reward I was doomed to an eternal damnation. I’m one of the enemy! I cannot, and will not, accept vampires…and I cannot forgive the likes of you. So I condemn you. I condemn you both. I condemn you all.
Knight snatched the pyroclast bomb from the war wight. Krannor yanked Cross’ head back.
Cross took them by surprise. He threw all his weight backwards and into Krannor. He brought his bound hands up in front of him and pushed the lich off balance. Cross lunged at Knight.
Time slowed down. The war wight stepped in Cross’ path and grabbed both of his gauntleted hands with its cold and steaming claws. Cross screamed as the wight’s talons ripped through his wrists. Those blades cut him down to the bone, but he pulled back with all his strength and tore his hands free from the gauntlets.
The containment gauntlet that covered Cross’ necrotically diseased left hand flew apart. Termites made of black shadow exploded all over Cross’ arms and seared his skin with their necrotic chill. Shadows raced up his chest. The cold was so deep it gnawed straight through to his bones.
Cross went numb. He knew he had only a moment before he died.
He lashed out. Though robbed of his magic, Cross was now covered in raw and destructive arcane power, the magic of the disease he’d been infected with when he’d battled the hound in the forest.
That disease had only one purpose: to annihilate.
