Graves was Cross’ only real friend aside from Snow. They’d known each other for as long as either of them could remember. Samuel Graves was an experienced soldier and a Hunter for the Southern Claw. He was also an admitted social deviant who insisted on trying to get Cross into as much trouble as humanly possible.
Before Cross could meet Graves, he had a number of errands to run. He wasn’t looking forward to any of them.
First, he walked Snow home, where she would doubtlessly await the arrival of Geoff. As much as Cross hated thinking about his sister being involved in a relationship, he liked the idea of someone watching out for her when he wasn’t around…which, as Snow had accurately pointed out, was most of the time. That Geoff was looking out for Snow was really the only reason he and Graves had let the faceless boyfriend keep breathing, or so Graves liked to claim.
Lengths of transparent cable filled with viscous colors stretched out over the streets. The web of cables was bound in a thick mesh that made Thornn appear stitched. The cables conveyed messages, hex currents and fluids that raced back and forth across the city.
Red dust and gravel filled the air with a gritty haze. Thornn’s buildings were round and sinuous, made from sandstone and brick and occasionally reinforced with cold steel plates and black iron meant to ward off incorporeal threats. The city structures were tall and clustered tightly together, lending Thornn’s narrow streets the semblance of valleys running through urban canyons. There were parts of Thornn rarely touched by sunlight, but steam vents and green-fire street lamps prevented the accumulation of ice on the roads. Narrow windows reinforced by iron panels spilled a multitude of fluorescent lights onto the streets located deep in the city’s heart, where some blocks had been left intentionally flat so as to house fountains, statues, or replicas of the obelisk monument on Ghostborne Island. Children played beneath the protective canopy of spirit shields and armed nannies, and this deep in the heart of Thornn’s Centertown district Cross was always struck by the smell of bakeries and bars, a strangely delectable blend of cardamom, hazelnut, sweet liqueur and cigarillos.
Snow lived in a small apartment across from the library, a columnar red and white stone building hedged in by leering gargoyles. The sky was bruise pink that was slowly fading to purple and onyx.
“ Tomorrow night, then,” she said, knowing full and well that if she made it a question Cross would find some way to become unavailable. “I’ll make you something tasty.”
“ So we’re ordering out,” Cross said with a nod. He smiled and dodged Snow’s attempt to push him down the stairs. “Am I seriously going to have to meet Geoff?”
“ Yes.”
“ Fine. I’ll see you then.”
“ Be good.”
“ I’ll try.”
Cross went north and out of the Centertown district, and it was amazing to him how rapidly Thornn shifted from semi-respectable and trendy to utterly seedy. Lesser used streets, even narrower than elsewhere in the city, wove like veins between unnamed bars and hashish houses, brothels, unregistered doctors and soothsayers. Thornn’s normally immaculate roads were filled with refuse in the part of the city known only as The Dregs, and the normally radiant gas and thaumaturgy-powered street torches cast ghostly flickering glows that danced in feeble luminescence off the dark buildings. Scantily clad whores slithered along the brick and mortar lanes like drugged serpents, and the harsh scent of arcane hash and sex clung to everything. Cross heard shouts from behind closed wooden doors, some of them raucous and fun, others violent and angry. He saw people garbed in sacks and sleeping in the gutters. People had blistered feet and unclean faces. Money changed hands. He saw an occasional mugging, over and done with before it was even clear what had happened. There were fewer people in The Dregs than in Centertown, but they were made legion by the murky light.
His spirit hovered close, and she clung to his skin like a sail to a ship. They were both calm — they’d been in worse places, but it was still difficult for her to sift through the clouds of emotion there in The Dregs so that she could help Cross keep clear sight of what lay ahead. Illegal dealers and unscrupulous merchants made heavy use of arcane locks and wards, which meant that the streets in The Dregs were more packed with spirits than with people, invisible to normal humans but not invisible to warlocks. Cross couldn’t see those spirits so much as feel them, just as he could never truly see his own, at least not with the physical eye. Of her he had a sense, an imprint in his mind’s eye of how he thought she appeared which in turn, he believed, crafted her actual form. If ever there was a way to lay eyes on her in actuality, he would know her on sight. She was, quite literally, a part of him.
Cross wandered for a time, until at last he came to a narrow alley he recognized, a place marked by silver runes etched into the enameled black stone that stood at the intersection. An alley dipped at a sharp angle down to a single black door. The recess was so dark it was nearly invisible to the naked eye; only the presence of more silver runes made it possible to see the door at all. The sky overhead had grown red and dark. Cross heard carousing and drunken laughter emerge from the open doorways of nearby bars, and dim green streetlamps feebly sputtered light against the grit and shadow.
“ You want something?” a dark man asked. His skin was black, pure black, and his bare chest and arms were covered in more of the concentric silver runes. Even more runes adorned his face, highlighting his angular cheekbones, his thick lips, and his lack of eyes.
“ Yes,” Cross said with a nod. “She’s expecting me. This is the right hour, so she should be ready.”
“ I know.” The man’s voice was deep and hollow, like he stood at the bottom of a deep well. “But the question is, are you ready for her?” At that he laughed, a deep and hollow boom of a laugh that vibrated the air with its staccato rhythm. He gestured for Cross to go ahead with his black hand that was laced with bright silver rings.
God, I hate that guy.
The door was unlocked, but it was heavy and its hinges were rusted and old, so it still took considerable effort on Cross’ part to actually force it open. His spirit clung to his skin with ethereal claws as the portal groaned open. A subtle air filled with incense and musk escaped from the other side and enveloped him. The room within was lit by golden candles, and strangely-angled mirrors seemed to float on the onyx walls. Dark chairs and black curtains lent the room a claustrophobic air. Cross let the door seal shut behind him.
“ There you are.”
Warfield pushed her way out from behind the curtain. Her black dress was loose and flowing, and it looked like it had been clawed at or chewed on at least twice. The sleeves hooked around her long fingers, which were tipped with stark black polish. Her boots were tall and made from black leather, and were fastened by silver buckles. Warfield’s dark red hair was cut short, allowing Cross to see her heavy earrings and the runic tattoos on her neck and what part of her chest her dress left exposed, which was quite a bit. Warfield was almost as tall as Cross was — impressive given that he was just over six feet — and she was lithe and as thin as a ghost. Her black lips pulled up in mock smile.
“ Here I am,” he said.
“ Did you bring it?”
“ I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t.”
“ Then step into my office,” she smiled, and she led him back through the curtain and into a dank and cluttered room piled high with arcane detritus, broken magical components, empty alchemy vials, used batteries, spare wires, a variety of clamps and pliers and shreds of parchment and dried wax. Warfield’s desk was a tiny table that walked on its own accord. What appeared to be gargoyle’s claws attached to the table’s surface held an iron lockbox.
But what really drew Cross’ attention were the knives propped against the back wall, displayed high on the stone and illuminated by cold silver light that emanated from a number of crevices in the ceiling. The knives were curved, with thin bone-white handles and utterly black blades, the metal so dark it seemed to suck that light in. Runes were visible on the faces of the blades, and the edges were honed to so fine a point Cross could see how sharp they were.
“ Wow.”
“ You like?” Warfield smiled.
“ I’m not sure,” he answered. “I think I’m just intimidated.”
“ I’m talking about the knives,” Warfield said with a wry grin.
“ Oh,” Cross laughed. “In that case, yes.”
As far as Cross was concerned, Warfield was so far out of his league that even fantasizing about her was a waste of time. Cross had very little skill or luck with women, and, perhaps more importantly, he found that he rarely had the time to even worry about it…which was why most of his relations only took place at the Grey Angel, or, on occasion, the Red Scarab, the only two barely reputable brothels in Thornn.
Cross dropped a small black leather bag onto Warfield’s table, where it landed with an audible clink. His spirit recoiled as Warfield approached. Warfield’s male spirit oozed with power, doubtlessly tied in one way or another to the arcane generators Cross had detected behind the curtains. Warfield had enough energy surging through this place to detonate the entire block, which was why she kept everything so well hidden under dampeners.
Warfield opened the bag. Cross had collected a good number of wight canines over the course of his two years in the service. The dark iron teeth had been filed to sharpened points, and they were decorated with runes and ritual markings to denote kills, standing, rank, or place of origin. They exuded cold steam, but the effects were harmless and cosmetic, as they lost their poison and arcane qualities when removed from the corpse that had once bore them. Warfield smiled, and she opened the small box on the table for Cross. It was very plain, unpolished and old. The lock had been visibly broken, and the darkened wood looked to have been exposed to a fire or some similar calamity. Cross pushed his hand against the lid, and checked for wards or traps. He had no reason to distrust Warfield, but it never hurt to be careful.
You don’t live too long if you’re a trusting soul. That was a lesson Cross had learned early. Never trust a beautiful woman was another.
The pyrojack gauntlet was inside, as promised. It was an older and less attractive design than the gauntlets he used now, which were black leather and iron devices bound with wires that hooked to a belt-mounted battery pack; they provided assurance that he could both properly channel his spirit and that doing so wouldn’t consume his mind or his body. The pyrojack was different — it was an independent arcane item rather than an implement, and the lone remaining red gem set between the knuckles of the first and second fingers of the gauntlet was a self-contained weapon. Only a mage could activate the missile which, so far as Cross knew and so far as Warfield had promised, would launch out to a range of nearly 500 yards and explode with the force of three grenades. Best of all, using the missile wouldn’t exert any actual pressure on his spirit. The pyrojack would come in handy, he thought, for times when his spirit had been expended too much and was fatigued, or if he needed to use her for defensive purposes and a pistol just wouldn’t be enough firepower. Cross’ spirit helped him sense the power and potential in the device.
“ What are you going to use it for? A little stress relief while you’re on leave?” Warfield smiled. Blowing something up for kicks was pretty much what he expected Warfield would do with the pyrojack if it stayed in her possession…destroying things, period, seemed to be something Warfield liked, along with sleeping with men thrice her age and getting as stone dead drunk as she could on a regular basis.
“ I’m saving it for a rainy day,” he said with a shake of his head. As he put the case into his pack, he found his eyes drawn again to the ebon blades. Their silver slashes looked like scars. “What’s up with the black knives?”
“ They’re Necroblades,” Warfield said with a strangely proud smile. “Undead use them. Rathian assassins. They’re harmful to spirits.”
“ They target the spirit?” Cross asked with a nervous laugh.
Warfield shook her head.
“ They sever the bond,” she said. “Cut the spirit loose.”
It was every mage’s worse nightmare. While there were theories about such scenarios, no mage had ever been known to lose their spirit and survive the experience. The pain and shock of the separation was too much, like having your skin removed, but instead of a lengthy period of suffering the experience would be shaved into just a moment or two of intense agony. The spirit, if indeed it survived the separation even when its host did not, would in all likelihood be devoured by malevolent incorporeal predators of the world of the dead.
“ Where the hell did you get those?” Cross asked. And should I report them?
“ Come on, Eric,” Warfield smiled. “You can’t expect me to tell you where I shop for my toys. You might not come back.”
It was hard not to focus on her perfect skin, her pursed lips and her large, expressive green eyes.
“ You’re right. I might not.”
With purchase in hand Cross took his leave, and he returned to the soiled night. It wasn’t the image of the knives that burned in his memory as much as the notion of losing his spirit.
Cross had some time to kill before he was supposed to meet Graves at The Black Hag, so he briefly stopped by his home, an apartment at the edge of The Grange. The Grange was a secluded neighborhood known for its briars, antiquated wooden houses and incredibly steep roads made of dirt and stone. Thick iron fences sealed the Grange off from the surrounding neighborhoods, but the prevalence of twisted trees and shadow-drenched corridors of brick and foliage gave the area a vaguely threatening air. Even with armed patrols in the area and magically reinforced locks set on most of the quaint looking cottage-style houses, Cross usually sensed something malevolent in the shadows, just out of sight.
Cross’ apartment was located on the upper level of a small brown building. The lower floor was an abandoned book shop that had been boarded up some months ago when the owner had been found drained of blood outside of the city walls. With no heir apparent, Hobb’s Books was claimed by the city. The inventory was sold off and the funds were used to help rebuild some of the outlying homes destroyed in the Gorgoloth assault that had occurred the previous winter. Cross’ door stood at the top of a short set of cracked cobblestone steps. He purposefully avoided the thirteenth step, as he was highly suspicious that it was waiting to one day crack loose and send him into a neck-breaking fall down the previous twelve.
The inside of Cross’ apartment was dark and hazy. It was a single room layered in thick brown and black rugs and decorated with maps of the known world, illustrations of the Ebon Cities, and lists of arcane maladies, inhuman creatures and known vampire champions. Cross’ room looked less like a habituated living space than it did a poorly organized ready room. A single table and chair bore stacks of books, unwashed cups and mugs; the bed, which had no legs and lay flat against the far wall, hadn’t been made in months. Snow avoided his apartment as if it was infested, and Cross didn’t blame her. The air smelled musky, and the lone window let in only a feeble amount of light, largely because the glass was dirty beyond the capacity of even flame cannons to clean.
Cross lay down, and slept.
He dreams of knives, surrounding him, holding him in like a bladed cage. He stands on the deck of a black ship in a black sea, floating softly through dark laggard waters. Behind him is a dead city in the cold mist, and ahead of him, on the far shore, stands a black mountain and a forest filled with women as terrified and alone as he is. He knows who one of them is, and he knows he has to save her.
Cross woke just after dark, and he felt even more lost and uneasy than before he’d slept. He spent just a few minutes getting ready before he went to join Graves at The Black Hag. He couldn’t get the image of those black knives out of his mind.
The Black Hag was one of the only establishments in Thornn that Cross enjoyed spending time in outside of his own home. The subterranean tavern doubled as a gaming pit and a meeting spot for mercenaries, soldiers, criminals, and other luminaries of the seedier side of Thornn’s populace.
The most remote city of the Southern Claw Alliance, Thornn was a city in progress, a haven for repopulation after creatures released by The Black had wiped out so much of the human race. At first they had only been attacked by the vampires, pale-skinned fiends who’d first come in waves, like barbarians, unorganized and hungry, seemingly as shocked by this new apocalypse world as the humans were. After a time, the vampires slowed down, grew organized, and built the Ebon Cities, and they settled in to control much of what was left of the world. There were other creatures out there in the wastelands, as well, some of them worse than the “suck heads”: the monstrous Gorgoloth, the giant and enigmatic Cruj, the black-hearted Sorn, the Vuul, the Eidolos, and the undead, scores of zombies and wights and lich and ghouls and other things that should have existed only in nightmares. But nightmares had become real, or else they’d always been real and humankind had been ignorant of the fact until The Black came along and woke them up.
Cross wondered about that, sometimes — if the world had always been this way, Earth convergent with other realities, and if humans had just been cut off somehow, ignorant, adrift in the sea of their own isolation. The world was different after The Black, and very few could remember what it had been like before it had all happened, before the catastrophes and the vampire invasion, before magic and caustic seas, before liquid nightmares, before cities fell into earthen maws and the sky had turned to a corrosive red haze. It was hard to remember the world that had been before half of the people had died, before giant wolves and killer trees roamed the poisonous wilderness, and before abandoned and ancient cities appeared out of nowhere, in some cases shattering other cities in the process. Multiple worlds, squeezed into one.
But is that really what happened? he sometimes wondered. Had all of it — the cities, the vampires, the monsters — had it always been here, and until The Black we just couldn’t see it? Like one day…the illusion was gone?
No one knew. That was the frightening reality. It was known that there was a time before The Black, and they were now trapped in the time after, but as the years stretched on it became harder and harder to separate the two.
But under the guidance of the White Mother, humankind had banded together, and fortress city-states like Thornn had been built. There had been many more cities in the beginning; most of them hadn’t lasted long. Those that had endured, however, formed the Southern Claw Alliance, a confederacy of humans who worked together to survive in the brutal new world. Most of the power in the Southern Claw resided in the hands of the military, which fought off constant attacks staged by the vampires of the Ebon Cities and the other creatures from the wastelands. Most of the Ebon Cities attacks directed at Thornn were guided by an extremely old vampire known as The Grim Father, who ruled from the Ebon City of Rath, a remote place that was in many ways an undead equivalent to Thornn. Cross had never seen Rath. It was doubtful he ever would.
The music in The Hag — old world stuff, tinny, heavy with drums and electronics, music meant to be danced to by tribal people and arcane natives who understood the workings of modern machines — blared from mystic gramophones mounted high on the dirty stone walls. Iron gates sealed the large dungeon-like room off from the rest of the world. The lighting was poorly provided by smoking lamps that had been bolted to the tables, miniature chimneys that released an acrid blend of tobacco and cinnamon and turned the atmosphere into an eye-burning haze.
Cross and Graves secured a table near the back, where they met up with Graves’ friend Jonas, a warrior priest who could hold more liquor and stir up more trouble than Cross and Graves combined. The long-haired priest still wore his cross-emblazoned armor and his crimson cape, which made him strangely fit in well with the chamber full of mercenaries, drug addicts and slinky women.
Cross sucked on the cigarillo Jonas gave him. He regretted ever having quit, and he knew he’d feel different if he actually survived to see morning. Despite having spent the better part of two years in the presence of soldiers and other vampire hunters — a class of people known to play even harder than they worked, for it was never assumed that another chance to play would come again — Cross had a surprisingly low tolerance for alcohol, due mainly to his thin frame and high metabolism. Regardless, Graves and Jonas kept buying rounds, and he knew it was because he was so far behind them in the number of drinks consumed that he was still at the table instead of under it.
But it felt good — burning eyes and lungs and struggles stay conscious notwithstanding — to not be worrying about anything for a little while, to not be thinking about Snow and how he wanted to get both of them to somewhere else…not away from Thornn, necessarily, which was about as safe a place in the Southern Claw as anywhere, but just…somewhere else.
Away from everything. Away from vampires and arcane disease and monsters and nightmares and pain. Maybe that’s what that dream was about. I have to get away, get her to somewhere safe. Away from all of this death.
Cross wandered (carefully balanced) around the game tables, put some coins in and threw down dice a couple of times, won some money back, played cards, lost, shuffled his feet to the music as if he knew how to dance, watched some pretty ladies, was bumped into, drank another drink that Jonas gave him but wouldn’t tell him what it was, smoked some cigarillos, swam through the haze, his mind adrift and scattered, awash on the tide of energy, his whole body and being turned molten, suffused in that place, lost adrift for a night, not his, not anyone’s, part of the crowd.
But he came back to earth. He wasn’t sure when he saw her, precisely. In his haze and near stupor, he must have been up close when it happened, because there was no way his watery eyes could have made her out from more than about ten feet away. She was tall and thin, with medium-length dark hair and a tight, revealing dress. She was unquestionably overdressed for The Black Hag, but he doubted anyone who saw her minded. He was, frankly, unsure if he’d ever beheld anyone so beautiful. He also understood that she likely looked much better to him at that particular moment than she normally would, courtesy of the uncounted drinks he’d imbibed, but he didn’t really care. She was at the edge of the room, close to the wall and away from the main throng of people, looking about, as if for someone specific.
Of course she’s looking for someone, moron. You think someone who looks like she does would be here alone?
And yet, he walked right up to her. In his right and sober mind Cross would’ve watched her for a moment or two from across the chamber, contemplated what he might say, counted down in his mind, and then never gone to talk to her at all.
But you’re not in your right and sober mind.
“ Excuse me, Miss,” he said. He nearly had to shout to be heard over the noise. “I couldn’t help but notice…you look lonely.”
“ Well,” she smiled, “No. Not really. I am from out of town, and I don’t really know anyone.” She gave him a look. Her skin was flawless and pale, her eyes were feline and very sharp, and her lips were full. When she smiled her entire face glowed, especially her dark eyes. “Listen…I’m in a relationship. Long term, actually. Not that you…well, you know. In case that’s what you’re looking for…”
“ No, no,” Cross said, fairly certain he wasn’t lying. “No, I don’t…I don’t think so,” he laughed. “No, I’m not looking for anything. I don’t think.” He laughed. “Sorry, I…really just thought you looked like you could use someone to talk to.”
She smiled. People passed by, the light shifted, a roar erupted from a nearby dice table, and the strange music played on.
“ Yeah, I guess I could,” she smiled. “I’m Cristena.”
“ Eric,” he smiled. “But everyone just calls me Cross. It’s very nice to meet you.”
“ Why does everyone call you ‘Cross’?” she asked. “Are you a priest?”
“ No. It just happens to be my last name.”
“ Good of people to call you that, then,” she smiled.
“ I think so.”
Most of the rest of the evening passed in an even stronger blur than what had come before. He uncovered only the barest details about Cristena. She was from an Alliance city called Fane, located near where the recent massacre had taken place at Crucifix Point, and she was in Thornn to see if it would be a place she’d like to permanently relocate to. She was having relationship issues and was contemplating forging a path alone, but no decisions had been formally made. She liked wine, scarce as it was.
He was captivated by her. Maybe it was just because Cristena was a stranger to him or maybe it was because he’d consumed more alcohol that night than any other given night in his entire life, but Cross couldn’t look away when she spoke, even when he couldn’t clearly hear what she was saying thanks to the noise.
“ Is employment here steady?”
“ It is,” he said with a nod. “Best anywhere, actually.”
“ Right,” she smiled.
“ What do you do?” he asked.
“ I’m a tracker,” she said.
“ A witch?”
“ Yes. And you’re a warlock.”
“ Right.” If he hadn’t have been so drunk, he would have detected her spirit through his own. As it was, he was lucky to detect his own feet. Out of a mix of fear and confusion, Cross felt out and tried to find his spirit, and there she was, lingering just out his reach, the vapors of her ghostly self disheveled and twisted, curled into a form as unstable as Cross’ alcohol-induced mind.
“ There you are.” Graves came up and took Cross by the shoulder. He looked entirely too sober considering how much Cross had seen him drink. Graves was short and stocky, with messy blonde hair and a number of facial scars that were mostly hidden by his trim beard. His black shirt hung loose enough that the prominent number of tattoos on his neck and arm were visible, the largest of which were a barbed snake that ran the length of his well-muscled left arm and the fanged snake skull that was the symbol of Viper Squad on his right shoulder. “There’s some trouble.” He smiled at Cristena. “Well…hello there.”
“ Hello,” Cristena said with apparent disinterest. “Thanks for interrupting.”
“ What ‘trouble’?” Cross said in a panic.
“ An attack. Sorry, Romeo, time to go. Miss,” he said with a curt nod to Cristena. She looked ready to say something, maybe even to invite herself along, but Graves hauled Cross away. The room spun.
“ Graves, I am seriously messed up…”
“ Sober up, then,” Graves said. He didn’t sound like someone who’d consumed half a dozen black guavas. He grabbed both their flak jackets and hauled Cross into the street. They both wore their Southern Claw fatigues and steel-toed boots. No one ever really dressed down from armor in Thornn — it was a simple fact of life that if you did, you weren’t going to live very long.
The two of them launched up the stairs that led from the gambling pits to the elevated drinking floor, and from there they took more steps to reach the main doors. The air was a cloud of smoke and darkness, all generously flavored with enough whiskey that it stung Cross’ eyes until they finally made their way out to the street.
They emerged with their pistols in hand. Cross struggled with his standard issue warlock’s gauntlet, which was hooked by electric wiring in his belt to a portable battery pack secured with iron clamps. He nearly tripped on the top step. Cross felt his spirit surge and curl against him, tasted the hot hex of her power in his blood as she desperately tried to purge the alcohol out of his system. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his stomach lurched.
“ Wait.”
Thornn’s streets were tall and drenched with shadow. A dank yellow moon hung like a sulfur stain in the blue-black sky. Cross felt his guts explode as he vomited toxic yellow sludge against the side of the building. He threw up so hard it ached down to his groin.
“ That’s beautiful, man,” Graves laughed. Graves never had any trouble holding his alcohol. Chances were he was already sober, and he hadn’t needed his spirit to force the liquor from his system to reach that state.
“ Shut up,” Cross stammered. The shivering night was fish blue, tremulous and thin. Thornn’s buildings were so dark they might have been splashed there in ink. “Where are we going?”
“ I got a message from Morg,” Graves said. Cross saw the sending stone in Graves’ fist. “There was an attack in the Hightower district. Nasty stuff.”
“ And we’re supposed to help?” Cross asked hesitantly. “Unarmored and half-inebriated?”
“ Maybe,” Graves laughed. “Let’s go, man.”
Klaxon alarms sounded through the night. There weren’t many people on the streets — Thornn’s citizens were intelligent enough to observe the loosely enforced nighttime curfew — and those few who were about appeared only long enough to peer up the hill towards Hightower, a richer part of town marked by its tower-like buildings and elevated position, before they scurried back indoors. Cross sent his spirit ahead. He felt her race through the thin air, and she twisted and danced across the city in search of danger. Normally he only allowed her to roam a few hundred feet away, as his connection to her grew tenuous and the information he received from her was less reliable the further from him she was. Only witches had the talent to send their spirits out for long range reconnaissance. Cross’ spirit flowed in and out of buildings and deep shadows like a racing raven. She found the source of the danger, but by the time Cross and Graves caught up with her, sweat-laced and out of breath from a mostly uphill run over the course of fifteen blocks, it was all over.
The area near the tower where the disturbance had taken place was spare, just a few brick and mortar buildings, a small stables and a well. The air was quiet and still, and nothing moved in the buildings at the tower’s base. Cross looked up. The tower was ebon, and every window had long since been boarded up. The entry door stood ajar at the top of a short set of stairs. A dozen or so city guards, led by the enigmatic Moone, were in the process of securing the area. Arcane currents had been laid out in a fence-like pattern, weaved together tightly enough that no undead spirit could possibly escape. Green flames in iron sconces had been wedged into the ground, and they painted the air an eerie jade. Thornn citizens stood at the outskirts of the iron poles, huddled together and staring in at the scene of what had been a grisly slaughter.
“ There,” Graves pointed, and he led them into the throng of city guards. They were almost stopped, but Morg spotted them and motioned for them to be let through.
“ You missed the fun,” he said in his baritone voice. Morg was a tower of a man, standing a full head taller than Cross, and he was intimidating even in his loose tunic and sweat pants. He’d either been home relaxing or out for a jog, based on the sweat that still beaded down his dark-skinned forehead. “This one looked nasty.”
“ This is weird for the attack to come in the middle of the city,” Graves said. Cross could only nod.
Moone, the leader of Scorpion Squad, was a gaunt and bearded man with grey hair and steely blue eyes. He was one of the senior Southern Claw officers in Thornn — only Cross’ mentor, Winter, had anywhere near as many years of service as Moone did. Moone approached them with a grim look in his eyes.
“ We were just talking about that,” Morg said. “Strange for a suck-head to attack this deep in.”
“ It had been in hiding,” Moone said in his gravelly voice. “Mother isn’t going to like this.”
“ You mind if we take a look?” Morg asked.
“ I was hoping you would,” Moone said. “I think you’ll find what’s inside…interesting.”
The bottom level of the bell tower was an open space. There were a few chairs where people could sit and rest, and a table for meals and games. Now, everything was covered in knives. There were thousands of blades, and they covered every visible surface in a sea of razor quills. There couldn’t have been more than an inch of space left between the jagged edges. It looked as if ten thousand points had been jabbed into the walls, floor, ceiling and bodies and then broken off. Morg had to kick blades out of his path just so he could step into the room.
Three corpses lay in unrecognizable heaps on the ground, their bodies perforated head to toe by the rusty blades. Shreds of clothing clung to their decimated bodies. Bloody messes of hair and skin had spread like grisly jam across the room.
“ Wow.” Cross gagged and covered his mouth with a gloved hand. The smell of opened intestines and spilled bowels filled the air with the scent of an outhouse in summer. Neither Morg nor Graves showed any such signs of being repulsed. They moved slowly, in an effort to avoid the pools of blood on the floor and not to trip on or break any more of the blades. “I haven’t seen a vampire that used weapons like this in a while.”
“ Me, neither,” Morg said.
“ We think,” Moone said from behind them, “that the suck-head had been hiding out here in the tower. This building was condemned for safety reasons a month or so ago.”
“ Sir, who are the victims?” Graves asked Moone, but it was Cross who answered.
“ Two girls, one boy,” Cross said. His spirit clung to him as if for dear life. The spirits of the victims, severed from the human hosts, were close by. He felt them in the air, and their presence made it heavy and sick. They were lost and confused, and they would try to take Cross’ spirit with them, or else claw at her and attack her in their rage and confusion. “They were just having fun,” he said as the information came to him. “They were going to do some drinking, maybe some black powder.” He swallowed. His skin was frozen, and his fingers shook. It took everything he had to keep her close, to hold her back from those lost and tormented souls. They’d be gone soon, and she’d be safe.
“ There,” Moone said, and he indicated the far wall of the downstairs room. “That’s what I wanted you to see.”
Scrawled markings covered the wall. Runes had been drawn over a rough map, and coded notes, arrows and cross-marks connected dots and triangles and pictures of what looked like eyes. The entire wall had been hidden behind a sliding panel, a removable plate secured by old magic that the vampire had apparently torn away. The map was of the northwest part of the country, and it bore location markers for the Wormwood, the Bone March and even the Carrion Rift. The markings were coded, but from what Cross could determine they seemed to be arcane calculations, geo-empathic equations and cartothaumaturgic drawings. Someone had worked out a location, a place where they wanted to go.
“ What happened here?” Morg said out loud.
“ From what we can tell, the vampire came here for this map,” Moone said. “Either he meant to read it, or to destroy it. Then these young people came along…” They stood in silence for a moment. Soldiers barked outside at bystanders to back away. “My squad got the bastard.”
“ This map,” Cross said. “I’ll need some time to decode it, but at a glance…it looks like directions.”
“ To where?” Graves asked. “And who made it?”
Cross stepped closer. It would have taken an extremely experienced mage to make those calculations, to work out the geometry and arcane algorithms. He had no idea where the raw data had come from, but the work itself was complex. Only a few mages could have done it.
“ The Wormwood,” he said. “Red made this map. And if it leads where I think it does, she’s headed for the Wormwood.”