Black also bore a trace scar near her right eye, just on the outer edge of her face. It hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen her. It still looked raw, and it resembled some sort of collapsing star of blood. Her deep red hair hung loose around her shoulders, a bit longer than it had been before.
“
Hello, Cross,” she said quietly.
Cross hesitated. She was unarmed. He felt no trace of her spirit, which he guessed had been suppressed, just like his own had.
“
Are you okay?” he asked after a moment. The room seemed unnaturally still.
She regarded him quietly. He could already tell she had unpleasant things to tell him.
“
Yes,” she nodded. “I suppose I am.”
“
Cole?” he asked.
Black hesitated before she nodded.
“
She’s been better,” she answered. She watched him carefully. “I saw that Dillon was doing all right.”
“‘
All right’?” Cross said bitterly. He nodded. “If being locked up in a half-submerged fish tank, isolated in darkness, half-starved and left to bake out in the sun for a few hours a day is ‘all right’, then…yeah, Dillon is doing all right. So am I.” His icy stare was reciprocated in kind. “So what’s going on, Danica?”
Black smiled a sad and knowing smile.
“
Being a Revenger, I carry some…clout, I guess you could say, with the Ebon Cities. They don’t think of me as an equal, by any means, but they recognize the relationship they have with the Revengers, the group that I belong to.”
“
Which you
weren’t
representing when you were taken,” Cross said quietly. “And that’s why you’re here, hip-deep in shit with the rest of us.”
“
I’m the only reason we’re still alive,” Black said. Her look and voice made clear she didn’t care if Cross believed that or not.
Black leaned back against the wall. The air was sweaty and rank, like the underside of a dock. The stillness Cross had sensed before was abruptly broken as something groaned far away, and the walls shook. Likely Krul was changing again, its buildings re-aligning to form another new paradigm.
“
Danica,” Cross said, not caring that he could hear the desperation in his own voice. “We have to get out of here. That thing that Lucan was fighting, that shadow…that’s what Dillon and I were sent to gather information about, why we were sent to find the Woman in the Ice. It’s called the Dra’aalthakmar. The Sleeper. And it will kill a lot of people if we don’t figure out a way to stop it before it reaches Southern Claw territory.”
“
I know,” Black interrupted. “But right now you have to worry more about how we’re getting out.”
Getting out. We’re getting out.
Cross’s heart skipped a beat. He almost went to tears. Emotions that had welled up and been lost in the time spent in that dank and burning hell suddenly threatened to tear him apart. He felt his own irrational response, and he didn’t care.
“
How?” he blurted. “How will we get out?”
Black hesitated.
“
They’re going to…give us a chance,” she said. Cross swore she was near tears, which seemed very unlike her. “A fighting chance. The same chance they’ve given Kane, and Ekko.”
Cross nodded, relieved, but only for a moment. Pain seized his shoulders and his gut.
He remembered where Kane and Ekko were being held. He remembered what they had done in Krul before they’d escaped the first time.
He looked into Black’s eyes, and the fear that he saw in them matched his own.
“
Did you say ‘a
fighting
chance’?” he asked quietly.
Black nodded. Her scar caused the tear that ran down her cheek to take on the color of blood.
“
We have to fight in their arena games,” she said. “You, and me, and Kane, each fighting on our own. If we don’t…the ones we care about are going to suffer.”
Cross felt like he was spinning. He thought he was going to be sick. His insides rattled and his arms and legs almost went numb.
“
Fight?” he asked, hearing the fear and exhaustion in his voice. “How am I supposed to
fight
? Christ, Danica, I can barely walk!”
“
You
have
to,” she said. Her composure was gone. She was all anger and fear and distress, just like he was. “You have to, or else Dillon is going to die…slowly. They’ll do the same to Cole. They’ve already started in on Ekko.” She looked him dead in the eyes. Cross saw the truth there, the belief that there was no other way. “You’re going to fight, Cross. If you don’t, then Dillon is going to suffer, and then Dillon is going to die.”
ELEVEN
ARENA
The cold skies are filled with ice ash and frozen flames. Trees felled by a gnashing horde of dagger-like teeth surround him. Eyes like black stars squeeze out of the shadows.
The blue-white blaze races up the mountain. It covers the dark stone and frost-tipped sagebrush with a firestorm that turns the air to a sea of choking white smoke. He hears it coming, and he feels the mountain growl beneath him. Something shifts deep down in the clefts of primal and molten rock.
He runs. His spirit is with him, cleaved to his core. Waves of glacial air sweep over them at the fore of the tide of arc fire. The cold turns the ground to ice, and it breaks stones that have suddenly turned brittle.
He runs for the doorway.
She is there, the melting silhouette. Her body is like a butterfly held in stasis before a blazing white sun. Whispers of things long dead surround them and slice the air open like a storm of blades.
Something looms over the trees, vast and dark and more ancient than the world itself. Its presence is overwhelming, an avalanche of shadow.
The doorway collapses in on itself like burning paper. Its light falls away in drops of pale rain.
Black fire explodes from the ground in whirling ebon pillars that scorch the sky. He chokes on the stench of funeral pyres.
He leaps through the door as the mountain explodes into flames behind him, and he falls into a place of dead trees, red water and black sky. It is familiar.
The forest in the Reach. This is where we rested after we found the Dreadnaught.
She lies on the ground, and waits for him. She lifts her head and watches his approach. Her body is bathed in blood and soot and covered with terrible scars. It is almost too late for her…but not quite. He trembles as he kneels down and picks up her fragile body. He holds her tight as the blood that slicks down her neck and arms makes his grip on her body tenuous.
I knew you’d come,
she says.
He doesn’t know her. But he feels her pain, and knows that he has to save her, for she, in turn, will save him.
Cross drifted in and out of consciousness, and in and out of pain. He saw milk-colored chambers of icy steel and iron machines that churned steam and cemetery smoke.
They strapped him to a cold table. His skin was treated with pungent oils and powders that looked and smelled of grave dust. He was forced into a vat of crimson brine and black nutrients that soaked into his skin, and he was left to float weightless, somehow not drowning, like a fly trapped in honey.
Cross felt little of it. He could tell what was happening, but none of it seemed real.
He dreamed of the burning mountain, of escaping that dark shadow in the sky. He dreamed of the woman beyond the pale doorway, of her falling bloody into his arms.
Cross had become more cognizant in his dreams than when he was awake. The world was a vast and unstable haze of blurry colors and liquid noise. He felt detached, somehow, floating above himself as he was tended and healed by necrotic surgeons. He saw his own body revitalized with noxious chemical fluids the color of swamp water, liquids that were piped into his skin through metal tubes they inserted into his flesh.
He was drugged regularly. Cracked pills were forced down his throat by zombie surgeons, drugs were pumped into his bloodstream through hollow bone needles, and gases were released into the air around him to soak into his skin while he breathed through a tube. The undead that attended his body were unaffected by the fumes. Quiet and pale corpses with grim rotting faces tended to him, sometimes gently, often not. Cross was turned and poked and flipped like a piece of meat, a flesh doll. His existence had been rendered to a series of flashes: light and dark, color and sound, foul smells and pain. They leeched poisons from his diseased leg, only to replace them with different poisons, substances that would make him what they wanted him to be.
Cross had only a vague understanding of what was happening, but he knew that he was being healed. The vampires apparently understood that he was injured and malnourished, and even though they ultimately wanted him to fail in the arena, they also, for whatever reason, wanted to give him a fair chance. That part was Black’s doing, he was sure of it.
Maybe. Who can understand what a vampire thinks? Had it been us with vampire prisoners, we’d have destroyed the bastards, period. No chance to escape. Never.
Cross hovered between worlds. He saw cold fires in the operating room, and he heard the mountain as it growled from somewhere beneath Scar Tower. He felt the colossal breath of a ghost sky. The operating room was on the mountain. He was the fire.
Everything is bleeding. Melting together.
He grew stronger. So did his spirit.
Their bond was diamond-hard, but it was different than it had been before. That bothered Cross, but his head was already awash in senseless flashes. He couldn’t focus. She was different, their bond was different, and that was reason to be afraid, but in his confused and fatigued state Cross couldn’t determine why.
His spirit licked ethereal lips and violently swirled around him in a razorblade caress. She was a metal angel, and when she hovered close it tickled his flesh with a dangerous electric current, a pulsing and breathless aura that dripped with heat and tension. It was as if they were lovers: deadly, violent, uncaring lovers, bound by flame and lust, tantalizing one another with aggressive sexual promise, unheeding of the harm they could do.
Cross tried to pull away from her, but it was a half-hearted effort, and he knew it. He found this new form of contact with her intoxicating. He’d never been so close to anyone, even his old spirit.
Focus.
Snow. Lucan. Dillon.
He tried to keep important names at the front of his mind. He tried to remember why he was there, and why he needed to escape. He tried to remember who he was fighting for, and what he had to do. Sometimes he couldn’t recall what the names meant, or who they belonged to. Their faces had grown distant and hazy. But he fought to remember them, regardless.
Snow. Lucan. Dillon.
Others.
Black. Cole. Kane. Ekko.
Graves.
He wasn’t sure if he spoke the names, or if he just remembered them. It was hard to even tell where he was.
Focus.
Follow and you will find.
He was ready.
Cross stood before a set of polished steel doors twice as tall as he was. Their edges were scorched, and the reflective face had been bent, hammered and scratched. They looked familiar. He had the vague notion he’d stood there before.
The walls around him were sandy steel awash with oil, dirt and blood stains. The corridor vanished into darkness behind him, a caustic web of shadows filled with cries and steam. The ceiling overhead was a cracked glass dome stained with pollutants and desert debris.
Engines roared over and around him. He felt the city change outside the walls, heard it fold and twist. He smelled blood in the air, and he heard a low dirge on the other side of the door, a throaty vampire song.
Cross saw his reflection in the dirty steel doors. He was lightly armored in black and crimson chain. A tight leather-and-steel gauntlet covered his left hand; the gauntlet was bound to a battery on his back through a thin network of sharp gold wiring. Traces of arcane oil sluiced out of the wires and sizzled when they struck the ground.
He looked paler than before. His eyes seemed darker. Something inside of them teemed with madness.
What have they done to me?
His spirit held onto him like armor. Her touch burned even as it soothed, and her ethereal claws tugged at his back. She mounted him like a steed.
Cross felt numb. He knew this wasn't right, that he shouldn't have been there, but it was hard to think straight. Tension coiled through his muscles and his tendons. A sharp and serpentine sense of pain wound its way up the ridge of his spine. He shook with anger
anger at what?
and his stomach knotted up as tight as his chest. The armor he wore felt unnatural and wrong. It smelled burnt and charnel, like it had been taken off of a dead man and placed on Cross’ body, which he reasoned was probably what had happened. Runic markings had been cast onto the backs of his hands and his forearms: serpents, eyes, ankhs, blades. He felt the weight of a weapon in a sheath on his back.