Read Online Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) by Steven Montano - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Steven Montano
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focus.
“What do you want with me?” he asked.
“ The swords,” Hasker said, plain and direct. In a way, it was welcome.
“ Well, you have them,” Cross said. “Can I go now?”
“ We also have you ,” Hasker explained. “And only you can use them.”
How the hell do they know that? he wondered.
“ Where are my companions?” he asked.
Hasker watched him, breathing loud through his nostrils as the firelight played off his pale and heavily veined face. He pushed his tongue against his lips, then nodded to the Raza.
The woman was smaller than Cross had at first thought, barely a child, really. Runic markings lined her face and pale arms, and her fingernails were as black as onyx.
Smoke poured from her palms. Cross tried to back away, but the chain-wielder held him fast, and he no longer had the strength to resist. Ice blue mist swirled around his face, and the touch of it scalded his tongue. His eyes locked open, frozen like pools of glass.
He saw.
The Maloj’s claws lance out of the dark. Every strike from its dismal talons renders another life unseen. These aren’t the brutish killers they’d encountered at Rimefang Loch but calculating and subtle monsters, beasts with sinister agendas. With each assassination their presence grows, surrounding the present like vast shapes lurking in the depths of a pitch black ocean.
Every strike kills more than a life, cleaves a hole in reality. Creatures are sucked out of existence with such razor surety it’s as if they have never been. Lives un-lived, destinies unfulfilled. Time alters, not radically, as the theorists project, just subtle shifts, no hurricanes from butterfly wings, for the Maloj are careful: they see with clarity the effects their claws will have, understand with certainty exactly how things will be altered. They are temporal marauders, twisting and turning time like a river until it leads where they want it to go.
The Maloj kill the White Mother. It slips inside Ronan, and in the timeline that played out here was never found out, for the White Mother had never altered their destiny by delaying their ship, by ordering her most trusted White Council minions to lay the runes that sucked the Skyhawk out of Southern Claw airspace and into Nezzek’duul, a place protected by its own safeguards, massive arcane towers along its coasts which prevent foreign magics from invading unless they know precisely how to pierce those defenses. She saw this reality, this new timeline, and tried to alter it by saving those she knew would bring about the end of the war.
How? What are we supposed to do?
When the Maloj kill the White Mother, Thornn changes. The city still stands, but the Alliance is weak, never able to put up much of a fight. The Southern Claw fell years ago, easily overrun, and Thornn is now just a worthless outpost, abandoned even by the Ebon Kingdoms (not Cities).
He and Danica and the others didn’t know this, went unaffected, because they were protected from it. Nezzek’duul’s defenses hedged them in, kept them shielded from this temporal horror.
Without the White Mother only pockets of resistance exist. Fane is the East Claw Coalition, as monstrous and murderous as it was in their own timeline, capable of unspeakable cruelties and yet one of humankind’s only hopes. Meldoar is another safe haven, held by the stalwart Gol, who fight to protect their human friends from a terrible fate.
He watches the cities burn. People die by the thousands, cast into great pits or onto drill-shaped obelisks, and those who aren’t hacked to pieces and cast into reservoirs for the vampires to feed on are instead summarily executed by the toxins which flood the landscape.
The Ebon Kingdoms swallow everything, and soon occupy most of the north and the entire western continent. Lights from the Claw Stations flicker like diamonds and blood, and the harvesting field are filled with screams. Dirty
“What do you want with me?” he asked.
“ The swords,” Hasker said, plain and direct. In a way, it was welcome.
“ Well, you have them,” Cross said. “Can I go now?”
“ We also have you ,” Hasker explained. “And only you can use them.”
How the hell do they know that? he wondered.
“ Where are my companions?” he asked.
Hasker watched him, breathing loud through his nostrils as the firelight played off his pale and heavily veined face. He pushed his tongue against his lips, then nodded to the Raza.
The woman was smaller than Cross had at first thought, barely a child, really. Runic markings lined her face and pale arms, and her fingernails were as black as onyx.
Smoke poured from her palms. Cross tried to back away, but the chain-wielder held him fast, and he no longer had the strength to resist. Ice blue mist swirled around his face, and the touch of it scalded his tongue. His eyes locked open, frozen like pools of glass.
He saw.
The Maloj’s claws lance out of the dark. Every strike from its dismal talons renders another life unseen. These aren’t the brutish killers they’d encountered at Rimefang Loch but calculating and subtle monsters, beasts with sinister agendas. With each assassination their presence grows, surrounding the present like vast shapes lurking in the depths of a pitch black ocean.
Every strike kills more than a life, cleaves a hole in reality. Creatures are sucked out of existence with such razor surety it’s as if they have never been. Lives un-lived, destinies unfulfilled. Time alters, not radically, as the theorists project, just subtle shifts, no hurricanes from butterfly wings, for the Maloj are careful: they see with clarity the effects their claws will have, understand with certainty exactly how things will be altered. They are temporal marauders, twisting and turning time like a river until it leads where they want it to go.
The Maloj kill the White Mother. It slips inside Ronan, and in the timeline that played out here was never found out, for the White Mother had never altered their destiny by delaying their ship, by ordering her most trusted White Council minions to lay the runes that sucked the Skyhawk out of Southern Claw airspace and into Nezzek’duul, a place protected by its own safeguards, massive arcane towers along its coasts which prevent foreign magics from invading unless they know precisely how to pierce those defenses. She saw this reality, this new timeline, and tried to alter it by saving those she knew would bring about the end of the war.
How? What are we supposed to do?
When the Maloj kill the White Mother, Thornn changes. The city still stands, but the Alliance is weak, never able to put up much of a fight. The Southern Claw fell years ago, easily overrun, and Thornn is now just a worthless outpost, abandoned even by the Ebon Kingdoms (not Cities).
He and Danica and the others didn’t know this, went unaffected, because they were protected from it. Nezzek’duul’s defenses hedged them in, kept them shielded from this temporal horror.
Without the White Mother only pockets of resistance exist. Fane is the East Claw Coalition, as monstrous and murderous as it was in their own timeline, capable of unspeakable cruelties and yet one of humankind’s only hopes. Meldoar is another safe haven, held by the stalwart Gol, who fight to protect their human friends from a terrible fate.
He watches the cities burn. People die by the thousands, cast into great pits or onto drill-shaped obelisks, and those who aren’t hacked to pieces and cast into reservoirs for the vampires to feed on are instead summarily executed by the toxins which flood the landscape.
The Ebon Kingdoms swallow everything, and soon occupy most of the north and the entire western continent. Lights from the Claw Stations flicker like diamonds and blood, and the harvesting field are filled with screams. Dirty
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