sixteen

wolves

 

 

 

They rode fast, but it wasn’t fast enough.

The six riders, who had started at such a remote distance, closed the gap between the groups seemingly without effort. At the rate they approached, they’d be face-to-face before nightfall.

The howls of the wolves started in again, closer this time. Much closer.

“Let’s put some distance between us and them,” Stone said. “Now!”

The terrain had become much more difficult to manage, particularly in the failing light. A scarlet filter had been draped over the sky. Thick patches of rubble lay in the path, which led to a high hillside at the edge of a forest of dead trees. The bloody haze of the sun was rapidly disintegrating. Cross peered into the trees, but his eyes were unable to pierce the thickets, and all he could see were more shadows.

“Are we going in there?” he called back.

Cross rode with Cristena at the head of the party. The riders were right behind them, only a few hundred yards away. Their thick red cloaks fluttered in the dry wind. They wore red armor and bandoliers stocked with knives, hex rods and grenades. They had thick black hair, pale and gnarled flesh, red eyes and ebon fangs. They rode Blood Wolves: massive, horse-sized lupines with dark red fur that was mottled and thick. The wolves’ oversized heads bore half-moon yellow eyes and enormous, slavering jaws.

Graves fired on them with a SIG Sauer in one hand and a snub-nosed Colt Python in the other. Most of his shots went wide, but one took a vampire in the shoulder and nearly threw it from its wolf mount, but the undead creature clung to the leather reins and held tight.

The vampires had the momentum of a runaway train. They were suddenly so close it was as if they’d been right up on the squad’s heels all along.

Cross and Cristena were nearly to the forest.

“Go!” Stone shouted. He leapt out of his saddle, turned and knelt down with the M16A2 and the grenade launcher in his hands.

Cross pulled his pack off and desperately dug through it for something – anything – that might prove useful. He found vials of anti-toxin, rolls of bandage, chemical batteries…

“Cross…” Cristena said as they rode closer to the forest.

“We’re not leaving,” he said as he dismounted. Cristena followed suit. He heard the wolves draw close. Their staccato howls came at him in unison, a deadly dirge that shook the ground.

Cross found the pyrojack, and quickly pulled it over his shaking left hand. The leather and steel gauntlet fit snugly. There were two open nodes on the outside of the glove between the second and third knuckles. The first node still held a red-black stone whose face swirled with energies that hummed with arcane potential.

Graves fired his third and last loaded pistol, a banged-up HK45 like Cross’. A shot hit the lead rider square between the eyes, and both he and his wolf came crashing forward in a violent heap of skin and fur.

Stone knelt close by with his rifle at the ready. He was alone on the lower stretch of ground. He aimed at the riders as they thundered towards him.

The riders drew to within a hundred yards.

Cross felt a spirit whisper in the air around him. He even felt her against his skin. Something nearby howled with a rancid and bloodcurdling cry.

The vampires were fifty yards away when Stone pulled the trigger of the M203.

The grenade tore the ground apart with a violent explosion. Two riders and their mounts exploded in a mess of blood and fur, and two more crashed to the ground down behind them.

One wolf had just started to rise before arcane bolts of black rock skewered both it and its rider. Cross felt Cristena’s effort beside him, felt the strain that the magical attack placed on her spirit.

Graves and Stone fired at the other wolf and rider. The Remington took the wolf’s head off in a gruesome spray, and Stone moved in to finish the vampire off with his black-bladed machete.

The vampire was quick. It sprang to its feet and leapt up and over Stone’s head with a whirling flip that put it into position behind him, but Stone anticipated the move, turned, and took its head off with a clean turnaround swipe.

The last vampire-and-wolf pair leapt through the smoke left behind by the grenade blast. Stone’s back was turned, and the wolf landed on him and threw him face down to the ground with a crash. Graves called out, reached to his back and unsheathed his machete. Cross felt the pyrojack tingle against his cold flesh.

Behind him, Cristena screamed.

A vampire had grabbed her from behind. It had slithered out of the woods and outflanked them. Its black eyes reflected Cross’ face back at him. Cristena’s blood splashed across its pale cheeks. Her eyes went white. Her open jugular pulsed and oozed beneath the caress of black fangs.

Cross heard her spirit scream. He almost saw its gossamer entrails as it poured every last bit of its form into protecting her, into keeping her alive when her body already should have expired.

Then Cross heard Stone shout. He heard Graves’ cries of fury and the snarl of beasts. His heart raced so fast it felt ready to explode out of his chest like a cannon shot.

He aimed his HK at the vampire eating Cristena, right between its eyes.

She falls

He closed his eyes.

up

And he is there with her in the glade. The black mountain looms over them, powerful, vast, ancient, dripping power so raw it congeals and falls like sick rain. The air is moist and cold. Ice floes drift in the stream. Rain-addled leaves plummet from the trees in curtain-like sheets and land on the forest floor.

She is there. She has not fallen, hasn’t left him alone, not yet. He only thinks she has. She is not yet gone.

“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. “What do you mean ‘not completely sure’…you have the map!”

“Translated and decoded from an archaic language. I cracked the code used to write it – I think – and I translated it from memory. I told you this already.” Cross stared back down into the fire. He wasn’t going to stand up and argue. “I told you this.”

“Then what’s the point?” Graves said with a shrug. “I mean, damn it, Cross, why aren’t we back in Thornn, waiting for the end in style instead of wandering around out here, watching our friends die one at a time…”

“Because I’m going to find my sister!” Cross just avoided shouting. “If that’s all right with you.”

Graves shook with anger and futile frustration, well aware, Cross was sure, that there was nothing and no one around to take it out on. After a moment he sat down hard and wiped a hand over his face.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Cross laughed sourly.

“I wouldn’t leave your sister out there,” Graves said. “I’m sorry.”

“Listen,” Cross said. “It’s not like the world is going to end the second that Red gets there. The Old One is still trying to buy his way back into the graces of the Ebon Cities, right? She’ll give him what she’s got, and he’ll need to arrange things with the Grim Father. Everything is politics with the vampires. It’ll take some time.”

Graves looked puzzled.

“One thing that’s always bugged me, Eric…why doesn’t she go straight to the suck heads?” he asked. “Why go through the Old One at all?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s giving her something in exchange for her information. Maybe she’s his girlfriend. Maybe the vampires just won’t talk to her directly. I don’t know.”

Cross looked up past the heat blur of the campfire and into the night sky. He knew how exposed they were, and how easy it would be to spot them from a distance, but for some reason he didn’t think they’d have any more trouble that night. It was almost like he’d regained a sensation of the surrounding areas, a heightened sense of what was where.

It was almost as if he had his spirit back.

“We need to stop in Rhaine,” he said after he rechecked the maps again. “If I’m reading Cristena’s maps right, there isn’t really a way of actually getting across the Carrion Rift from this far west, but there’s a bridge and a pass to the east, right within a few klicks of the city.”

Graves nodded.

“We’ll get supplies,” Cross continued. “We can leave Stone or Cristena there, if we have to. Maybe we can get a message out to Thornn.”

“Wow,” Graves laughed. “Listen to you, Squad Leader.”

“No,” Cross laughed nervously. “I’m pretty sure you’re in charge, actually. Chain of Command, and all.”

“Ah, to Hell with that. You’re doing great. I’m not much for giving orders.” Graves stared out into the night. “Do you think Snow is ok?”

“I don’t know,” Cross said. “It’s been driving me crazy. I keep trying not to think about it, but…”

“But then I bring it up.”

“No, no…I can’t help but worry. I hope she is. I hope she’s okay.” Cross stared into the loathsome dark. “She’s all I have left.”

“I know,” Graves said.

“I can’t imagine losing her.”

“Yeah,” Graves smiled. “Look, she’ll be fine. Red may be a bitch, but she’s not stupid. Snow is a hostage, after all. And besides…is Red a tracker?”

“I don’t know,” Cross said. Not all witches were trackers. In all her years as Thornn’s leader and the voice of the White Mother, Red – Margrave – had never displayed any of a tracker’s talents. “You know, Sam, I’d never thought of that. Powerful or not, I’m guessing Red must’ve had the same problems with that translation as I did…I mean, don’t get me wrong, my map is pretty good, but having a tracker with us will help when we get closer to the mark. Cristena can navigate the arcane streams and follow the trace lines once we’re close enough to Koth. She can get us there when the map can’t give us any more useful information.” His heart lifted at the thought. “Maybe Red will need that kind of help, too.”

And maybe, just maybe, that means Snow is still alive.

“She’s going to be all right,” Graves said.

“You think so?” Cross said, sadly. The crackle of the campfire popped loudly in his ears. “I keep thinking about our childhood, Sam. I keep thinking about all of the things she and I did, all of the…memories. Stupid things, really. Just us, together. And I keep thinking about…about what a terrible brother I’ve been to her lately.”

They sat in silence for a time.

“I felt the same way, when my Dad died,” Graves said at last. “Like I’d been a horrible son. Like I should have spent more time with him. Trust me, Eric…it doesn’t help.” He looked right at Cross. “What’s done is done. Do what you can now to make things right.”

Graves finished cleaning the weapons, and then he retired to sleep.

Cross stared at the fire for a long time. He couldn’t stop shaking.