Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) Read online

  “You could use a shave,” she told Cross with a laugh.

  “I think the beard makes me look dignified,” he said back.

  “No. Just old.”

  The ship dropped straight down until they were only about thirty feet over the ravine. As the ship lowered its exhaust scattered the deep fog and silver smoke at the bottom of the canyon and revealed twisted ruins, a cluster of shattered black rock and smelted stone.

  “Put us down there!” Cross shouted.

  Ankharra motioned for the pilot to keep descending. The ship blasted away mist and water. Soon the narrow and jagged walls of the canyon prevented the Bloodhawk from going any lower.

  “That’s it!” the pilot yelled.

  “Good enough,” Cross said. Ankharra handed him a sending stone, which he tucked into his pocket. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t be long,” she said. “You don’t have much time.”

  Danica took a breath. She tried not to think about the fact that they were once again leaping into the jaws of death, or that one of the few living people she’d ever cared about was about to risk his life to save one of the others.

  Images of Kane’s death flashed through her mind. She shuddered. She wouldn’t lose someone like that again.

  “Go!” the pilot yelled.

  Danica and Cross slid down the lines. Gelid wind rushed up at them as they fell through twisting clouds of ice mist and grey smoke. Adrenaline coursed through Danica’s veins. Her spirit burned through the fog and shielded them from the biting wind.

  The ground seemed to rush up at them, and her spirit made sure they didn’t injure themselves when they touched down on the canyon floor. The ground was pale and uneven, and the narrow space was bound in by jagged quartz and loose shale. The flow under their feet was dark and thick, but the river had once been deeper, as evinced by the water lines on the rime-covered walls. Standing stones embedded with trace outlines of crimson runes dotted the riverbed like teeth.

  The ropes went taut as Wara and Grail started their descent.

  Danica looked up the rope. “So who are these guys?” she asked. Both she and Cross had weapons drawn as they watched for signs of trouble. “These Grey Watch clowns?”

  “You’re never heard of them?” Cross asked. His breath frosted in the air. Danica’s spirit glazed her flesh with warmth, and she opened her metal palm to extend some of that heat to Eric. “Thank you,” he said.

  “I’ve heard of them,” she said. “They seek out magical threats to the Southern Claw. The question is what they’re doing here.”

  Cross looked at her grimly. “They were looking for you,” he said. “To stop you from destroying the Witch’s Eye.”

  “I had to,” she said. “It would have kept making Witchborn.”

  “But look at what happened,” Cross said. As if to remind them, a billowing howl sounded from the island up above.

  Wara and Grail came to ground. Wara looked up and motioned to the ship, and the Bloodhawk’s turbines kicked into full force as the vehicle lifted up over the bank in a blur of dust and water haze. The Doj woman towered over the rest of them, and both her and Grail’s faceless masks made them look fearsome.

  “Lead the way,” Wara told Danica. She watched the giant for a moment, then looked at Cross. He nodded.

  Ankharra had given Ronan’s whereabouts to Danica when they were back in the ship, and the information was now locked in her mind. She closed her eyes and sent her spirit out in a wave of sound and light. He slithered through the standing stones and moved along the edge of the ravine, racing through the iron mist to find Ronan.

  “This way,” Danica said, and she moved ahead.

  This sucks, she thought bitterly. That six-armed bitch manipulated me into destroying the Eye, and the Grey Watch is probably going to hold me responsible. She glimpsed back at Cross. She thought she suddenly understood why he’d left the team after their mission into the Bonespire, why he’d chosen to set off on his own rather than bring them all with him. I hope you don’t get hurt because of me.

  She wove through the stones. She wasn’t sure why but she didn’t want to touch them, even though her spirit hadn’t registered anything to make her believe they were actually dangerous. Cold emanated from those broken pillars, a deep and penetrating chill that made the air sharp.

  Danica came across a carcass lacking most of its flesh. The body smoked with cold, and its blood had spread and stained the ground in a grisly red-black halo. The chest cavity had been ripped open by what appeared to be teeth and claws and the crusty black wounds had frozen and gelled in the frigid air. The bearded man’s face was petrified in a look of horror.

  By what little clothing remained Danica thought the body belonged to a fisherman, probably from one of the clans who lived off the eastern shores of Rimefang Loch and made their living filling trawlers to sell to Ath and the other outlying communities. A half-opened bag filled with netting and bones lay nearby. His fingers were bloody, like he’d been clawing at whatever had attacked him.

  “Is that him?” Wara asked.

  “No,” Danica said.

  Cross slowed and ran his fingers against one of the standing stones, tracing the faint crimson runes. His eyes fixed and his mouth moved slowly, as if reciting.

  “Eric?” Danica said.

  “Yeah,” he said, breaking his gaze. “I thought I recognized something.”

  They pressed on past the stones, but still saw no trace of Ronan. The twisted riverbed continued to wind into the mist. It grew darker and colder, which meant they’d descended so deep into the cleft they’d passed under the overhead crack that formed the ravine and had moved underground. The icy smoke was so thick it was all but impossible to make out any details of their surroundings.

  Danica stopped, her chest cold from the raw air. Her spirit moved away from her to gather details of the cave ahead. He burned through mist and skimmed the surfaces of frozen pools, reached up to test the heights of the cavern and probe the crumbling shelves of rock and petrified dust. The hole seemed to have no end.

  They heard growls the moment Danica found Ronan in the darkness ahead. He was surrounded by three other creatures. Danica didn’t recognize what they were but knew they were unstable, more shadow than living, shifting from human to wolf to something in between.

  “There!” she yelled, but the others were already on the way. They crushed ice and slush underfoot as they charged through the fog.

  The darkness grew thick, so she pushed her spirit ahead as a cloud of fire, which spread across the ceiling of the cave. Silken waves of shadow pulled back as the fog burned away. The cave narrowed to a wedge-like point. Pillars jutted from the ground like massive and serrated daggers.

  They saw Ronan, bloody and beaten, holding his ribcage with one hand and fending off his attackers with a long-knife His shirt was torn, his cowl had been half ripped away and his body was covered with festering cuts and claw marks.

  He was being attacked by wolves made of shadow.

  The lupine forms were monstrous even hunched over, but so unnaturally dark the light of her spirit’s flames was insufficient to give them definition. They shifted and wavered, at one moment two-dimensional and the next hulking masses of fur and fangs. Only their eyes were constant, pure white and dead, gleaming cold moons.

  They snarled. Danica brought her spirit down as a spear of fire, but the wolf shadows twisted out of the way. They followed no rules, just warped and ran like spilled ink.

  Waves of cold darkness flew at the rescue party. Wara fired into the ebon murk with the AA-12, but the thunderous rapport of the auto-shotgun was dwarfed by the deafening howls. Grail launched bladed arrows and Cross released bursts from the MP4.

  The wolf shadows folded around the bullets. Those few rounds that found purchase spattered chunks of inky matter across the ground.

  Danica brought her spirit low. He wound around Ronan as liquid claws moved in, and she felt a jolt of bone-chilling cold as the talons lanced through th
e hard shell of spirit armor. In the tips of those claws she felt centuries of rage, hatred from unimaginable depths. She saw a cold oblivion filled with shadows.

  The Black. These are creatures of The Black.

  “Cross!” she shouted, but he already knew.

  He rushed forward with Soulrazor/Avenger and dove into the ebon mass. Danica drew Claw and ran after him. She hacked through shadows, severed oozing limbs. The wolves had lost most of their form and substance and had become a raining web of coils.

  Claw sliced open a dark appendage, and Danica watched in horror as the tentacle-limb slowly pulled back together. Oozing black ran across her skin. Her spirit barely wrapped around her body in time, and she still felt steaming cold needles punch through her flesh. Her breath turned to frost, and she cried out in pain.

  Everything bent. Shadows spilled across the ceiling.

  “Danica!” Cross shouted. “Torch it!”

  She took a deep breath. The air sliced through her lungs. She screamed as the skin on her cheek burst open from the touch of edged darkness. She focused her mind, and her metal arm glowed with cold. Red light burned from behind her eyes.

  Danica cried out. A column of fire launched from her hands and scorched the false night. Roiling red and white flames burned back the shadows.

  Cross leapt into the receding mass and hacked at it with his blade. Shreds of black fell to the ground in dripping ribbons. Howls echoed through the cavern and shook the walls. Wolf visages took shape, ugly and teeth-addled things with burning eyes and blood dripping from their maws. Cross fought them back. He moved like he’d been born with the sword in his hand, like he’d always known how to use it. He ducked and leapt and swung and sliced open the wolves. Necrotic blood covered his body.

  Danica burned back more of the shadows with a sweeping arc of blue fire. Wara hammered the weakened wolves with the shotgun. Grail dodged past all of them and made for the deepest recess of the cavern, where he grabbed Ronan, who seemed barely alive, and pulled him back the way they’d come.

  “Let’s go!” Wara shouted.

  The shadows grew, redoubled. The sight of them burned Danica’s eyes.

  The team backed up and out of the cave. Grail took Ronan first, and Wara provided cover. Danica’s spirit exploded through her fingers and smoked against her skin. She poured cold and flame into the darkness and forced it back, but it adapted. Her magic suddenly didn’t seem to harm the black wolves as much as it had before, but Cross’s blade did. Power radiated from Soulrazor/Avenger in a fuming cloud of carbon and ash and fused around his body, forming a shell of crystal armor the shadows couldn’t penetrate.

  “Cross!” she yelled.

  More of the wolf-shapes bled down from the ceiling. Mounds of black goo pooled on the ground and stood up in the shape of wolf-men, with slathering jaws dripping acid drool and claws like burning knives. Their bodies were cloaks of midnight haze.

  The twisted and undulating mass that had come at them before had almost burned away. These were new creatures. Something more real.

  There were three of them, seven-foot humanoids with wolf maws and burning meteor eyes. Danica blasted one with her spirit, but it held its claws high and streams of flame harmlessly glanced off the walls.

  One of them closed in on Cross, stepped right through the crystal armor and shattered it. Brittle ice glass rained to the ground.

  Cross raised his blade, but the wolf was faster. Claws sank into his chest. He stopped, seized, and his body went rigid. The talons pulled free, and he fell.

  “Eric!” Danica’s heart froze, and she screamed.

  THREE

  DEADLANDS

  Ronan stopped when he heard Danica scream.

  Claw wounds burned across his flesh. Every inch of his body was wracked with pain, and it was all he could do just to stay conscious. The Lith warrior didn’t want to stop, but Ronan forced his body to go limp, and the one they called Grail had no choice but to come to a halt long enough for him to twist around so he could see behind them.

  Cross had fallen. Ronan saw the nightmares take shape. He’d only managed to kill one of the wolf-things, and that battle had nearly cost him his life. Every rake of their claws had filled him with nightmarish visions: walking towers of blades and teeth, forests made of bone, whirlpools in a blood sea, islands of meat and sacrifice. And a void, a dark and vast emptiness so deep and wide it could have swallowed up the world.

  He felt Cross’s pain as the warlock fell. They shared those horrific scenes, looked into the rift together. Icy darkness ran through his veins.

  He drew the long-knife and tried to pull away from Grail, but the Lith held Ronan back, then nocked an arrow and fired. The shaft flew into the wolf-man’s eye, and its head whipped back as it howled in pain.

  “Shoot!” Ronan yelled at the Doj. The big woman growled and hammered the beast with the AA-12. Black flesh exploded and dark blood splattered across the ground.

  Danica grabbed Cross and hauled him to his feet. Ronan felt the darkness flowing from his wounds. Cross’s twin blades visibly pulsed with power, somehow granting him strength.

  The wolves didn’t seem interested in pursuing them as they escaped. The mass of shadows, the wolf-shapes Ronan had battled before, just whimpered in the darkness, held at bay by the triad’s presence.

  Those things I fought were just foot soldiers, Ronan realized. These three are the leaders.

  He and the others scrambled up the floor of the ravine. Ronan didn’t look back as they emerged from the cave and out into open air, but he knew instinctively the injured wolf had already healed itself.

  “Jesus…” Danica breathed. “What the hell were those things.” Cross coughed, and groaned in pain. “Eric?” she said. Danica had to hold him up, just as Grail had to support Ronan. “Eric, are you okay?”

  Cross made to answer, but his voice wouldn’t come. His eyes went wide.

  “Fight it!” Ronan shouted. “I did it, God damn it!” He pulled away from Grail. Danica couldn’t hold Cross, and he fell onto his back. “Fight!” Ronan shouted at him.

  He tumbled to the ground next to Cross. The visions still clawed at the edge of his thoughts, trying to pull him away, but Ronan’s mind was focused – a lifetime spent training to block out pain and fear under the iron-handed tutelage of the Crimson Triangle gave him an edge.

  You have one, too, he thought as he grabbed Cross’s arm. The once warlock writhed on the ground. Black spittle burst from his mouth. His body was convulsing. You have the swords. They protect you. Use them.

  “Eric!” Danica said.

  “They’re coming!” Wara shouted. She fired into the darkness.

  Ronan saw the shadows approaching. Dead voices filled his head. The wolves would be on top of them in moments, and slithering darkness flooded the walls like a tide of ink.

  Shit. Ronan looked down at Cross, who still had one hand locked around Soulrazor/Avenger’s hilt even as he convulsed. Shadow sweat broke through his skin. Why not? Ronan thought.

  “Give me a second,” he said.

  “What?” Danica demanded. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to try and find him.”

  Before Danica could ask what he meant Ronan took a deep breath and focused his mind. He felt the distant sound of his own heartbeat as it slowed and faded to a far-off drumbeat in the mire of his soul. His vision went grey, and the details of the world around him blurred. Noise faded. Something like smoke pushed around him as the air crystallized. His fingernails turned black with frost.

  He’d been trained to enter that refuge, a place where he ignored pain and fatigue. When he set foot in the Deadlands he was utterly without fear. Ronan had been trained to skirt the outer edges of that void, to walk its perimeter, but he’d never fully set foot into it. He didn’t know what to expect.

  Some said the Deadlands were just a metaphor for a trance-like state, a peace and calm for a damaged consciousness. Ronan and some others thought otherwise – that the D
eadlands were actually another world, a place of quiet and darkness, much like the Whisperlands except one could master the control needed to come and go. He had a feeling that’s where Cross was now.

  Moments before his mind crossed over Ronan reached down and touched the twin blade. Cold energy shot up his arms. He screamed as ancient power lanced into his soul.

  Ronan is adrift. His feet find no purchase as he floats through a void of water and storm. The air chills his skin blue.

  He steps onto an island in the marsh. Silver and grey mist cages him. The air is silent and weighted with the stench of rot.

  Cross is there, seated on the ground, looking dazed and lost.

  Ronan walks over to him. He can feel the wounds all over his body: shadows bleed from his chest, and his veins bulge black. Ronan’s fingernails grow into claws. He doesn’t need to see his own reflection to know his eyes have turned ebon. Tufts of razor fur push out of his chest and face.

  One of the beasts appears in the mist, a shadow-wreathed humanoid with a monstrous wolf’s head. Its hands are capped with iron-cold talons. Eyes like blades cut through the hazy darkness.

  Ronan turns to face the creature. Cross tries to rise and help, but Ronan shoves him away. Only one of them will face the wolf. Only one of them will suffer this fate.

  The air is thick with the stench of the monster’s unnatural presence. The island begins to crumble and come apart.

  Darkness explodes across his chest. The still and silent air is broken by the sound of claws crunching through bone, the sound of blood glistening down edged nails.

  The sound of someone dying.

  Drifting.

  He isn’t dead. Not yet.

  He flies over fields of pain. A young boy with a shock of black hair and a grim expression marches across a desert of skulls. His naked back is raw with sunburns and scars from where the whip has landed. His sandaled feet are bloody and blistered.