Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) (4 page)

Jade hesitated.

“He has ways of masking you from their presence,” she said.  “But you’ll have to remain close to him.”

This keeps getting better and better
, Black thought.  Surprisingly, though, she thought Jade sounded truly encouraging, maybe even sympathetic. 
I’ll keep that in mind.

“This is a
crap
idea, Dani,” Kane said.

“Don’t be scared, Blondie,” Sol said.

“I wasn’t talking to you, Beefsteak,” he said. 

Ronan looked at Danica.

“It’s your call
.”

Danica looked at her friends, and then at Jade.  This was worse than she
’d
thought. 

Why are you looking for me
now?
she wondered. 
Why can’t you just leave me the hell alone, Rake?

She tapped her foot.  They had to get home. 
For all they knew,
Cross’
s
life depended on it.

“Give us an hour,” she said.  “We’ll meet you back here?”

“Of course,” Jade nodded.

“Dani…” Kane said as they left, but she put a reassuring hand on his arm.

“
We don’t
have
much
of a
choice, Mike.  You guys go, help them out.  I’ll make sure Cross is secure and try to keep
us
both
out of sight.” 

They
moved
a
short
distance
away from
Vago’s men
before she stopped and looked at them both. 

“We need to play this bastard’s game, at least for now
,” she said.
 
“You guys
take Maur and go
with them, do
the
job, and I’ll try to keep any more of my old friends from finding me. 
Right now it’s just important that we
get home.”

TWO

rubicon

Something had broken through the boundary.  Something
big
.

The turbines
on the Rakzeri airship
Wicked
roared loud
as they
blasted
away waves of
cold desert
sand
.
  The sky was pale and vast,
and a
dank
red
glow
pressed up from
the western horizon.  Kane smelled sea salt and coal dust on the icy wind.  They were just a dozen miles from the Ebonsand Sea, a dark and impressive expanse o
f churning waters and dangerous,
unnatural storms. 

Kane knelt down in the sand and
fac
ed
the barrier, a series of
tall
arcane pillars made
of
limestone and granite. 
The line of stones stretched in either direction for as far as the eye could see. 
Each pillar was covered
in
dark runes that supposedly cast an invisible shield
between them, which
acted as a twenty-mile long fence
between
Blacksand
and the wild territories to the
north and
west
. 

A pair of the pillars had been broken,
however,
and up close it
appeared
they’d been rammed by some sort of vehicle or
a
large creature.  Unfortunately, the salt winds off the Ebonsand coast had
blown
away any tracks
, so all he could tell
for certain
was that either an armored land mammal or a small tank
had smashed through the stones
.

Awesome
, he thought. 
Is it too much to ask
for
things
to just
be easy every once in a while?

“Well?” Jade asked.  The witch stood just inside
Wicked’s
open
bay door
.  T
he ship
hovered a few
yards
behind Kane
and less than a foot
off
the ground
. 
It was appropriately named: every Rakzeri ship Kane had ever seen looked like a handful of broken knives shoved around a conch-shell.  The ships were efficient and fast but, in his humble opinion, ugly as hell.

Jade’s
long
dark hair caught in the wind.  She was
very
short –five feet, if
even
that – and as thin as a rail
.  I
t was a wonder she didn’t lift up
in
the breeze and sail into the sky. 

“
‘Well’ what?
” Kane said.  “
You’re
the expert. 
Y
ou tell me.”

Kane had to shield his eyes
from
the dust
kicked up by
the
Wicked
, but there
really
wasn’t much to see other than the
boundary, an
unnamed arcane perimeter
built by
the mages of Blacksand
to keep hostile wilderness mutations and primitive humanoids at bay. 

It occurred to Kane
that
they weren’t far from
Crucifix Point,
the site of a terrible massacre at the hands of a vampire kick murder
squad
several years back
.  Ever since the Southern Claw had pulled most of their resources out of the area to concentrate on fighting
the vampires in and
around Rimefang Loch, the more
the
southerly
territories
had
fall
en
into disorder
.  Now they were just a
lawless haven for criminals, pirates and
outcasts
.

“It doesn’t look good,” Jade said.  Kane hadn’t even seen her disembark from the vessel, but
suddenly
she
stood
on the ground
right
next to him.
Ronan
was
behind her
. 

Jade walked across the cold sand
with sandaled feet
. 
Kane’s
skin went cold at the presence of
her
spirit
. 

“Well?” Ronan asked. 
Only his eyes were visible beneath his shemagh
.

“Give her a second,” Kane said.  “You got a hot date, or something?”

“Blow me,” Ronan growled.

“That’s between you and your date,” Kane nodded.

“
Grow up,
” Jade groaned. 

She walked past Kane
and
up
to the nearest obelisk
, which stood
some
eight-feet-tall and three-feet across
even after it had been broken
.  The obelisks were partially submerged in the sand
.  There was roughly fifty feet between the individual stones, and they’d been
linked
together with
a
thin iron chain that had snapped and fallen
on
to the
ground
. 

“There are trace
s
of
foreign
magic
here,
” Jade
said.
“
Something
used
it
to shatter the barrier.”  She concentrated a moment. 
“
Ebon Cities magic
.
  Chattel sorcery.
”

“
Shocker,
” Kane said. 

“That’s terrific,” Ronan said with a shake of his head.  “What now…‘Chief’?”

Kane tried to ignore the comment.  Ronan was
upset that
Black
had put Kane in charge
while she
stayed behind
in Blacksand,
but
Kane
liked it even less
. 

I shouldn’t be in charge
, he thought. 
The only reason it’s me is because Black knows Ronan is two steps shy of being a complete nutcase,
but she does
n’t
just
want us to take orders from Vago’s flunkies.  God, this sucks! 

“This is the third breach we’ve found,” Kane said, mostly to himself, and then he turned to Jade, “but this is the first time you’re been able to get a read
for
what might have caused the damage, right?”

“Yes,” she nodded.

“Then we should go through
here
, and check it out.”

She gave him an annoyed look.
 

“So you’re an expert on magic now?”
she asked sardonically.

“Don’t get your
panties wrinkled,” Kane said.  “Do you disagree?”

“No,” Jade said after a moment.
“But
maybe you should let
the
mage
ma
k
e the call on
things
related to
magic
.” 
Her smile went cold
.  “
Got it
?”

Kane
glowered, but he clenched his teeth
and
bit back about fifty insulting comments that came to mind
.  He heard Ronan laugh behind him.

We wouldn’t be in this mess if not for the f
riggin’ Revengers
.  He and Cross had always kno
w
n
it wouldn’t be easy for Danica to
walk away from
Black Scar
, especially with as much a
s she seemed to know about
T
he
Revengers
. 
But
we didn’t expect
them to track her down here, in the middle of
N
owhere
S
quared
. 
They
were basically out of money and short on all of their other supplies,
and
they really had
no easy way to escape.  Working with Vago
was
the only way they’d managed to stay out of Black Scar’s clutches, and every day
they had to hide
and rely on his protection
they
just
fell
deeper into his pocket.

Jade
looked at
the barrier
again
.  Her attention was lost in the shifting sands. 

“What
is it
?”
Kane
asked.

“I don’t know…” she said
.
“Something’s here
…s
omething
is tied to this
land.” 

Her voice was dreamy and distant, and
she
stared
straight ahead.  Kane cautiously stepped around to
look at
her face.  Her eyes
glowed
.  They
were locked in some arcane realm, trapped in a vision of magical trace lines or spectral pulses or some other damn thing Kane only barely understood.  Even with as much as he’d
learned about
magic in the two
years he’d
spent
with Cross and Danica, very little
of it actually
made sense to him. 

“
‘Something’ is…kind of
vague,
” he
said
.

“Something
old
,” she said.  “
S
omething
powerful
.”  Her eyes blinked,
and when she opened them again
their normal cold
green
color
had
returned.  She looked dazed for a moment,
and
then
regained her composure and
looked at
Kane
.  Whatever she saw on his face made
her smile
.  “
What, did I creep you out?
”