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Authors: Steven Montano

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BOOK: Soulrazor
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The rest of the team were all newer faces, but only the swordsman, Ronan, had been with the group for less than a year, just long enough for the excessively paranoid Kane to decide that the blade-yielding mercenary wasn’t a vampire spy or another aspect of The Sleeper. Ronan was a tall and imposing man, thin and bony, with wild dark hair that stuck straight up, an angular and skeletal jaw, dark armor and pale skin. He had a habit of concealing his face behind a face-wrap, and he bore at least two razor-sharp swords at all times.
“
How many?” Ronan asked. They couldn’t see his face, but the tone of his voice made clear that he was smiling.
“
How many
what
?” Kane asked grumpily.
“
How many vampires are down there?”
“
Dude, how in the hell should I know?” Kane snapped. Just because he’d grown used to Ronan didn’t mean that he actually
liked
him – quite the contrary, in fact, and while Ronan acted fairly indifferent towards Kane, Kane talked Cross’ and Black’s ears off about how much Ronan drove him crazy.
“
Because you and Cross are the ones staring out the window,” Ronan said flatly. “Duh?”
“
Tell you what,” Kane smiled, “
you
can go down and ask.”
“
Girls,” Black groaned. “Please.”
Grissom laughed from behind them, a sound that seemed to shake the vessel and rattle the steel walls. The half-Doj had coffee-colored skin and no hair, save for a thin mustache and beard. His considerable muscles were covered by his dark armored coat, but there was no mistaking his mass, since the big man stood over eight feet tall and was as wide as a truck. An AA-12 automatic shotgun dangled from a strap around his shoulders, and enormous blades and hammers dotted the bandolier he wore over his massive chest.
His sister, Ash, twenty years his senior, was his opposite in a number of ways. She was fully human and darker skinned, but like her brother was also bald. Her lithe and athletic frame was covered in snow-colored leather armor worn mostly as a formality, since she was rarely exposed to direct combat. Rather, Ash was the group’s tracker and healer.
Finally, there was Maur, a Gol engineer and pilot who insisted on referring to himself in the third person. Like every member of his strange race, Maur resided in a stolen body: he was a diseased and pestilent dwarf with no memory of who or what his people had once been. Maur had an uncanny knack for repairing things, and for making very creative use of seemingly ruined equipment. He also had a skill for driving everyone crazy with his sometimes nonsensical ramblings.
Everyone looked ahead through the main viewport. Maur moved the vessel as close to the Bonespire as anyone in the Southern Claw had ever dared to get.
For almost two years, the dark tower that stood west of Thornn had remained quiet, even though the threat of a direct conflict had always loomed. Just a few months prior, the Bonespire’s campaign against Thornn had begun in earnest, and it had turned into a long and bloody affair. Luckily, the Southern Claw had anticipated the conflict, and it had met the vampires in the fields west of Thornn so as to keep most of the fighting away from the city itself.
A number of land and aerial exchanges had to that point resulted in something of an uneasy standoff. But there was more to come – Southern Claw intelligence had discovered that the Bonespire housed some new Ebon Cities weapon that had not yet been unveiled. Cross’ team had been sent to find out more about the weapon and, if possible, to destroy it.
Lucky for us, we’re too used to these kinds of jobs to complain about how impossible it’s going to be.
Cross didn’t make a habit of complaining. After a mission ended with the death of every member of his old squad, Cross was given the option to pick his own future in the Southern Claw military. He spent a year acting as a “special operative”, and eventually he was assigned the mission that introduced him to Black and Kane. That same mission had resulted in many deaths before the threat of The Sleeper had been quelled, among them close to two full Platoons out of Talon Company, Kane’s lover Ekko, and a good-hearted ranger named Jamal Dillon.
After that, Cross decided to no longer be a part of the Southern Claw, at least not directly. His new team, made up of mercenaries and soldiers-of-fortune, took on dangerous missions for the Southern Claw, but they were not officially a part of the military. They were a rescue team, assassins, a clean-up crew, and rangers. Above all else, they were incredibly adept at getting themselves into insane amounts of trouble.
In the two years since they’d formed, they’d never chosen a name for the group, even though
Cross’ Cutthroats
and
Mage Gunners
had both been tossed around by the military (who loved them) and by other mercenary outfits (none of which liked them). Neither Cross nor the others cared for any of the nick-names they’d heard. Likely they’d continue to go without any official title for their band, at least for the time being.
Cross surveyed the faces of his team. He’d never expected to be doing this, to be…leading. He was responsible for others, and he was the one they looked to for decisions and direction. He’d lost six team members in two years, which, all things considered, wasn’t that bad. The most recent casualty had been Zane, a young war mage who’d died in a skirmish with Vuul bandits about ten months earlier, and his death had given them a need to find another hitter, which was when they’d recruited Ronan.
Cross got to know the members of his team well. The group always worked on their own, and they rarely turned down a job. They were paid well enough to stay in operation, and none of them really had much of a life outside of the team.
“
Maur says we’re about two minutes away from the drop point,” Maur said from the front of the ship. The diminutive pilot looked entirely too small to be flying the aircraft, even though they’d reconfigured the pilot’s seat to accommodate him. The vessel was controlled by a fairly standard steering stick and a set of levers and pulleys that ran into the starboard wall casing. A pair of foot pedals controlled the vertical tilt, and there were so many gauges and screens and batholitic charts that Cross couldn’t even tell how much fuel they had, let alone determine anything complicated about the craft.
Luckily, both Maur and Black knew how to pilot the ship, which meant that the team wouldn’t be entirely up a creek if something happened to one of them.
Now if something happens to
both
of them…well, then we’re screwed.
The vessel tilted forward. A hard gust of soul-tainted wind slammed against the side of the vessel.
“
Everyone ready?” Cross shouted out. He still felt awkward doing that, calling out commands and signals to action. It felt like it should have been someone else doing it, not him.
“
I’m first, right?” Ronan asked. He sounded eager.
“
You’re a wacko,” Kane said.
“
Thank you,” Ronan smiled.
“
Kane goes first, along with Black. I’ll follow right behind them, and Ronan and Grissom will cover the rear.”
“
Maur will wait here,” Maur said.
“
Thanks,” Cross answered. “We figured as much.”
“
Don’t forget these,” Ash said. She handed each of them an inhaler made out of dark metal. Wisps of pale steam escaped from the devices, like they housed bottled fog.
“
Do we
have
to?” Kane whined.
“
Only if you don’t want to vomit up your insides the moment you inhale the poison air in the Bonespire,” Ash smiled. She handed one to Grissom, and her younger brother dutifully inhaled, even though he clearly didn’t want to.
“
It feels like swallowing a mint…covered in piss,” the half-giant coughed.
“
Well, good,” Ash said. “Since you’re so big, you get to take
two
hits.”

 

The vessel flew through what they hoped was the final layer of dark clouds. Caustic grease rolled across the windows and left a dark film. The smell of burning fish filled the vessel and burned their eyes. They heard dead winds and spirit moans and the pound of sick rain against the hull.
Cross kept his spirit close. She practically snarled against him. She wanted to strike out at the dismal energies that they sensed beyond the walls of the Darkhawk, as Kane had taken to calling their vessel. He felt Black’s spirit bristle, as well, and her spectral consort clung to the dark interior of the ship to keep himself under control.
Their spirits had grown used to one another. To her credit, Cross’ never cowed to Black’s dominant male power. If anything, she was often the one that was more out of control, and even after three years Cross still had to apply extra effort just to make sure that she didn’t cause too much damage during her occasional bursts of rage. It got easier all of the time, but sometimes Cross just didn’t understand what was taking them so long to adjust to one another.
Because what happened to you is entirely unnatural,
he told himself.
You’re lucky to have a spirit at all. Stop bitching that you can’t get her to behave.
Ash’s spirit, on the other hand, was reserved and nearly silent. One of the advantages that a witch had over a warlock was that they weren’t burdened by such a short lifespan. It wasn’t that witches lived to be terribly old, by any means, if for no other reason because the nature of their powers generally placed them directly in harm’s way, but generally speaking they usually had more time to patiently develop a relationship with their spirits. Cross, in his late twenties, was practically considered to be of a venerable age for a warlock.
The turbine engines struggled to elevate them the last few hundred feet of their vertical journey. They moved below necrotic shadow web sensors and between rotating pillars of acid light.
The Darkhawk was easily three-quarters of the way up the length of the Bonespire, tilted at a steep enough angle that everyone had to grip the iron bars that ran the length of the ceiling to avoid falling into the bay doors behind them. The noise outside was deafening.
Cross wiped sweat from his brow and adjusted the Remington 870 strapped to his back. A pair of HK45s sat in holsters on his belt, and the hilt of a bone-white and incredibly thin blade protruded from the back of his waistline. The magical weapon had lost most of its arcane properties, but it had been bestowed to him by the Woman in the Ice, an avatar of the mysterious White Mother, unseen leader of the Southern Claw Alliance.
Cross still had a few questions regarding what all of that meant, and thus far he hadn’t had much luck in hunting down any answers.
Black moved up next to him. She held a Winchester 1892 Short 44 Magnum rifle in her hands, an archaic device that belonged in a Clint Eastwood film, which was likely why she carried it. A revolver and a machete lined her otherwise thin armaments, especially compared to Kane’s heavy sword, MP5A submachine gun, a pair of SIG Sauers, a heavy combat knife, and a few grenades. All three of them stood shoulder to shoulder as they looked through the gritty film that covered the window.
The top of the Bonespire loomed overhead, a grim edifice made of shadow and ebon steel. Cross had bore the sight of the structure from across the ice fields for most of his adult life. Up until a few months ago, if not for the ebon clouds and the presence of dark machines that moved menacingly through the surrounding sky and at the tower’s shadow-drenched base, one could have believed it was a dormant structure, a dark monument to the vampire’s power.
No one from the Southern Claw had ever breached the interior. It took a dozen witches working in tandem to cast an enchantment over the Darkhawk – a price that had come at a pretty penny, even with the so-called discount that Cross’ black market contact Ilfesa Warfield had given them – to make it so that they could get as close as they had. Those enchantments allowed them to slip through the various enemy defensives without bringing the considerable Ebon Cities’ forces stationed around the tower down on top of them.
And while there was no guarantee that the enchantments would last long enough to get them clear for the return journey, the Southern Claw brass had decided that was an acceptable risk.
Cross felt like he’d swallowed something sour. He looked at Black and Kane and then at the rest of his team, and he tried to shake off the feeling that something terrible was about to happen, that no matter how many impossible situations they’d walked or flown or swam into before that this one was different, that this time it was too much, that the risk was too great, that none of them would get out alive.
He knew that he was probably just being paranoid. He also knew that fear meant he would try that much harder to make sure that each and every one of them made it home.
The ship leveled out and ascended as if it had landed atop a rapidly rising sea. Gravity seemed to leave them, and the team held on to the beams and walls to avoid floating into each other. They fell, up.
The ship drifted back and forth as it made the ascent, and as they drew closer to the tower they eliminated the lights and turned the ship utterly dark. They could only see each other by the dank ethereal illumination that spilled down from the hexed defense beacons at the zenith of the undead citadel, a pale and sickly glow that rendered their faces and weapons in ghostly silhouette.
BOOK: Soulrazor
5.51Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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