cloth wrap and a thick red cloak that looked as tattered as a battle flag, but the diseased flesh was difficult to completely hide away. His hands look withered, and old. “Small bites. Let is dissolve in your mouth. Eat too much, and you’ll choke.” The Gol’s yellow eyes had no pupils. His voice was gravel and stone. “There will be no water. You drink your piss, or the water in your cell.”
They were the first words Cross had heard spoken in what must have been days. It took Cross some moments to assemble meaning from them, and by the time he did the Gol had vanished. He saw no trace of him in the crowds.
The sun beat down. The walls shielded them from the hot wind, but not from the molten heat or the cloying stench.
Cross sat for a while. There was not a shred of cover anywhere to be found in the open commons. The ochre clouds melted away, and the sun bathed the world in heat. Before long the light was so bright it was almost impossible for him to keep his eyes open.
He wandered around after he ate. A fight broke out between the Vuul and a pair of humans. The gargoyle sentries seemed to have little interest in the melee, so the Vuul was left alone to tear the humans apart with its considerable fists.
Cross turned away. He had no doubt that the humans would be eaten, and he wanted to know nothing of it.
His spirit moved around him in a sort of protective embrace, but all that Cross could sense was how weak and feeble she was, how helpless. He was going to have to keep her safe, not the other way around.
Maybe I can do it this time. Maybe I can actually protect someone important to me.
He sees Snow, burning. This time she is on that mountain. She stands below him, and the flames roar up from the valley and engulf her. He watches her flesh melt from her bones. She disintegrates in a furnace blast of cold fire.
Cross shook his head. He was going insane.
The pitted iron walls of the prison were covered in dust and sand that clung to old congealed blood stains that had sealed to the metal. Images had been scrawled there: claws, handprints, mouths. Beneath the gritty outer coating of desert grime were more elaborate shapes drawn or cut directly into the metal, pyramids and elliptical gods, eyes and teeth and bladed crescent moons.
Cross closed his eyes.
“ Cross?”
It was so strange to hear words spoken again so soon. Most of the voices he heard in the commons were guttural chants, or the whispered silver sounds of foreign tongues, and after a while they all faded into background noise, white static that filled his head as he wandered, not really words at all.
Dillon put a heavy hand on Cross’ shoulder. Cross stared up at him. It took him a few seconds to register who it was. The tall ranger looked gaunt. His eyes were sunken, like he hadn’t slept for days.
Cross regarded him stupidly, not understanding. When it became clear that he wasn’t dreaming, Cross slowly lifted an aching, gauntleted hand and put it on Dillon’s arm, and he held it there for a moment to make sure he was really awake.
He stood, and then he promptly collapsed in Dillon’s arms.
TEN
They were introduced to a new routine. After they were left to roast in the sun for a few hours every day, with only the foul-smelling brown gruel to sustain them, the prisoners were unceremoniously hauled out of the commons by gargoyles and returned to the darkness of their cells. Vampires with bone launchers and large-bored handguns watched from high up on the walls as the bestial winged creatures moved the prisoners. Considering how lethargic the inmates were, Cross thought the vampires needn’t worry too much.
Back in his cell, he drank foul water and tried not to fall unconscious and drown. He slept standing up. He dreamed of the cold inferno as it clawed its way up the mountain, and of a female figure as she died in the pale doorway. Sometimes Snow was there, as well, burning next to him.
Every day, he was removed from his cell and taken to the commons, where he met with Dillon. They saw no sign of the others.
The gruel and dirty water never changed. They were being kept alive, but not healthy. Cross’ insides burned like he’d swallowed an acid pill.
“ They’re going to Turn us,” Dillon said at one point.
There was no telling how many days had passed since they’d been first been brought to Krul. On those rare occasions when his head felt clear, Cross remembered being led through the labyrinth of dark halls by black-clad vampires in masks, then flown up a massive cylinder shaft by blank-eyed gargoyle warriors with bodies as solid as stone before he was brought into open air and dropped into the commons.
The gauntlets they fit him with every day ached and cut into his wrists, leaving them raw. His leg wound still throbbed, but it ached less than it had before. It may have even started to heal, though he couldn’t imagine how that was possible without some sort of medical aid.
It was never night, or at least it seemed that way. They were only brought outside in the blazing sun of midday. The rest of their time was spent buried deep in the tower.
He and Dillon sat with their backs against a wall and talked. They couldn’t actually see the sun, as it hid behind layers of dull clouds that looked like sand. The clouds in no way impacted the heat, so their senses remained dull and their limbs were heavy.
“ They’ll take their time doing it,” Dillon continued. His voice was slurred and his eyes were half-shut, like he was drunk. There were tears in his voice. “They’ll do it slow.”
“ We have to hold on,” Cross said. The commons seemed less crowded than it had before. The other prisoners huddled in groups, largely segregated by race, but a few inmates remained isolated. One man with wild hair and greasy stains on his face muttered to himself constantly. One Gorgoloth had lost an eye, but the brute sat hunched and played with the crusty orb like it was a marble. A pale-skinned Vuul stood quiet and stoic and stared up into the sky as if it waited for something to descend.
Everything smelled like an outhouse in summer. The air tasted fetid.
Cross thought about Snow. She hadn’t been taken to Krul — it had been the undead of Koth who’d broken her, not the vampires of the Ebon Cities, and she’d been broken in spirit rather than actually Turned, but in the end it was much the same as where Cross found himself now. He wondered if she’d been subjected to the same treatment as he, isolated and malnourished. He wondered if they’d also found a way to keep her awake for days on end.
“ Jeraline,” Dillon said. His words came slow, like he had difficulty remembering them. He seemed only half awake.
They heard the roar of turbine engines as vessels passed outside the city walls, and the roar and groan of Krul’s chains as the city realigned itself. Cross felt the metal rattle beneath them whenever Krul folded and shifted, a gargantuan puzzle piece being rearranged.
His spirit held on to him. He felt her warmth, different than that of the desert air. She was distant and faint. He wondered if he could channel her if not for the gauntlets, or if doing so would burn her out like a candle. It didn’t matter — there was no way the vampires would leave that option open to its prisoners. Doubtless there were a ridiculous number of safeguards and spirit dampeners all over the prison city.
The groups of prisoners shifted around every now and again, and some individuals roamed on their own. They wandered and talked quietly, held handfuls of food that looked like fecal waste. There was nowhere for them to go, and nothing to do. The upwardly sloped walls bore no cracks, handholds or protrusions aside from the spikes, which jutted straight out at the top of the walls a good fifty feet over their heads. Without shade, prisoners were left with nothing to do but bake beneath the sun on the sand-covered metal floors.
Cross’s mind felt lost, adrift, and asleep. He remembered that Dillon had spoken, and that suddenly seemed
