presence was destroying Krul. Arcane engines sputtered, and stopped. Razorwings were overwhelmed by the maelstrom of psychic effluvia let loose in the city, and the shock of it caused them to fall out of the sky. Chains buckled and snapped their links, which shattered into steel shards that fell like rain into the darkness of the city below.
The air tasted like smelted iron. Cross stared into that mass of murderous shadow, and he saw oblivion.
There, Ekko commanded. He tore his eyes away. His feet slipped, and he desperately clutched onto the pitted steel at his back. Vampire bodies dropped hundreds of feet and faded to writhing slivers before they vanished into the obscurity of the distant poison fog. Cross shook so badly it was a wonder he hadn't fallen himself.
Cross! Ekko yelled into his mind. Go!
“ Go?!” he shouted. His voice was hardly audible in the groaning dirge of the Sleeper. “Where?!”
Ekko pointed. Directly below them, maybe thirty feet down, was the smaller sentry vessel with the prisoners tied to the bottom of the hull. Kane was already in the open bowl of the vehicle, locked in hand-to-hand combat with the Doj vampire. One of the females lay headless over the lip of the giant metal raft, one piloted the vehicle using some sort of console at the center of the vessel, and the third female, in spite of having lost an arm, pulled herself up from the floor of the open cockpit. She moved towards Kane’s back with her one set of claws bared.
Ekko took hold of Cross' arm and pulled him away from the platform, and into empty air. Cross would have protested, but all that came out was a panicked yelp.
He and Ekko plummeted through open space. Ekko held him as they went, twisted her body under his and took the brunt of the impact when they collided loudly with the vessel below. Ekko's mostly undead body was as hard as iron. Cross’ head hammered, and his arm felt like it was about to pull clean away from his body.
The smaller ship listed to the side, and he heard panicked screams from the prisoners secured beneath it.
They'd landed right next to one of the motor guns. The vampire pilot screamed and hissed at them. The other female saw them, stopped, and turned.
Go! Ekko barked. She pushed Cross out of her way, and he barely managed to shoot out his hand and grab hold of the motor gun instead of falling over the side.
Ekko and the one-armed vampire attacked each other with vicious claws. The pilot pulled a large-bored pistol from her holster and, with one claw still on the control panel, aimed it at Ekko.
Cross spun the motorgun around so that its massive rotating barrels aimed inwards, at the pilot. It wouldn't work, and he knew it. Vampire weapons were specifically encoded so that the living couldn’t use them, so that they wouldn't activate if touched by living hands.
But Cross was bonded to Ekko, and that seemed to be good enough.
The gun creaked and swiveled and seemed to start firing before Cross even pulled the trigger. The rapport was ear-shattering. Thick metal bolts hammered back and forth and rocked the craft. Cross had to hold on for dear life so that he wasn't thrown over the side. Heavy bone-and-iron nails shot out with staccato force and turned the vampire pilot's torso into a cloud of meat. Ekko dove down as Cross swiveled the gun up and stopped firing. His hands ached from the force of the motorgun’s motion.
The ship lurched for a moment before Ekko pulled herself away from the one-armed vampire and gained control of the vessel.
Kane and the vampire giant fell against the lip of the open cockpit. Cross brought the weapon to bear on the other female and fired. The roar and grind of the motor gun was overwhelming. When the smoke cleared the other vampire was gone, cast over the side by nail fire.
The male vampire snarled. It elbowed Kane in the face and reached for Ekko. It stood just behind Ekko’s body, preventing Cross' shot. He felt his spirit course and surge against his skin like saltwater, and he almost took hold and channeled her before he remembered that he wore no implement. He'd burn them both to cinders if he used magic now.
Kane pulled a saber from the vampire's belt, and in a fluid motion he hacked its arm off at the elbow. The brute turned to face Kane, and while it was distracted Ekko lobbed off its head with a swipe of her ample claws. Kane threw what was left of the vampire over the side.
In spite of the terror in his eyes when he gazed at Ekko, Kane wrapped her tightly in his arms. Cross couldn't hear what was said — the grind of collapsing metal and the sky-shattering call of the Sleeper drowned everything out — but she moved as if ashamed, as if she didn't want him to see her.
She's not a vampire yet, he thought. Not fully.
The air was awash with ash, smoke and gunfire. The execution platform was aflame, as was a significant portion of Krul. Failing machinery collapsed from the Sleeper's presence, and fuel tanks exploded all across the city.
Cross grabbed the controls. There was no visible wheel or stick, just a number of metal plates scribed with runes in High Jlantrian, the vampire language.
Instinctively, he put his hands on the panels. The vessel immediately started to sink.
No, Ekko told him. She seized back the controls.
“ We have to get these people off of the bottom of this damned thing!” Cross shouted.
“ There're dead!” Kane shouted back. “What we need to do is get the hell out of here before The Nothing back there decides to eat us!”
“ We’re not leaving without Black!” Cross shouted.
“ What?” Kane shouted back. “How stupid are you? Who gives a shit about Black?!”
“ We need her,” Cross insisted. Ekko steered the vessel towards the execution barge, which had finally snapped free of the buildings and had started to level out as it sank. It lay directly in the Sleeper's path as the shadow slowly made its way through Krul.
They pulled weapons from the felled vampires. Kane could only use blades (of which he acquired several), which left the bone pistols, a rotating triple-barreled vampire shotgun, and some sort of necrotic whip device.
The Sleeper was half a mile away. It loomed and poisoned the night clouds. Its eyes were utterly dead vortexes of pale fire that devoured and fell in on themselves.
“ There!”
Cross saw Danica Black. She tried to stay low on the surface of the execution platform. She held a curved sword, but she was pinned down by a pair of vampires with rifles, who fired at her from the cover of the killing tree.
Cross cut them apart with the motor gun. A Razorwing turned and flew toward them in a long and looping circle. Cross fired at it and drove it off. He had no doubt there would be more.
The wind that bellowed out of the Sleeper was cold and furious and tasted like sparks. It had risen to a gale force. The small ship rocked unsteadily as Ekko lowered it towards the platform’s deck.
“ No!” Black hollered at them from below. She ran out in the open and waved her arms. “Don’t land…she's alive! Cole is alive!”
The skiff floated unsteady about a dozen feet over the smoking platform. The wind was so strong they felt like they'd be tossed into a building at any second. Ships moved fast all around them. They weren't moving towards the Sleeper anymore: they fled from it.
“ Don't land!” Black screamed. “I'll just jump onboard!”
She was maybe fifteen or twenty feet away, just ahead and below them. Cross moved to the edge of the vessel and aimed the vampire triple-barrel directly at her. It was incredibly heavy for such a short weapon. Vampire runes on the stock and trigger glowed softly against his skin.
“ What the shit?!” Black called out.
“ Don't!” Cross shouted back. “No! You don't get to act like you don't know why I want to kill you!”
Black took a breath, and raised her hands in surrender. Cross felt both his spirit and Ekko shudder against him, uncertain.
The city continued to collapse around them.
“ Christ, will you just SHOOT THE BITCH?!” Kane shouted.
“ Shut up!” Cross yelled back, and he shouted to Black. “We had a deal. Assuming Cole really is alive, so far as I'm concerned…” He breathed. It was so hard to hold his fingers still. “As far as I’m concerned, we still do.” He aimed the gun at her face. He wouldn't miss at that range, Sleeper or no Sleeper, and they both knew it. “Will you still honor that deal?”
