Faith Hunter: Blood Cross

A heartbeat later, two more marines staked Adrianna. But I saw her face first. Lifeless. The mind-joined, ripped apart by death.

I pivoted on one toe. To Baldy. Somehow he had the bloody gem in his hand. He was leaning in. He touched it to me. Into the cut made by the branch. Into my blood. The gem was icy on my cheek. Colder than the deeps of space. Colder than a night in hell. It ripped all my warmth from me. As if I could see it happen, the warmth that was life moved to the gem in a single heartbeat.

The pain it left seared every nerve. Spasmed every muscle. I grunted. Stumbled. Baldy stood over me. And he shouted a word of power. A spell wrapped into a single syllable of might. A wyrd .

As I fell, the marines screamed. Heinous screams, as if tortured. Instantly, they started beating their own flesh. Cutting away at their limbs. Cutting at the dancing red motes of power that spiraled down and burrowed into them. Each man assailed by the motes. More flew up from the ground. Down from the sky. Stinging. Burrowing. Attacking.

I landed. Facing Angie. Frozen. Unable to breathe. The spell had frozen my will and my autonomic nervous system.

She smiled. Her mouth moved, but my ears were buzzing with the concussion of gunfire, vamp screams, and white noise and her words were lost. She reached toward Baldy, her fingers throwing, the blackness in her hands set free. I could see it move out, through the air. A shaped, pointed spear of power. Before it hit him, Baldy repeated the wyrd.

My heart . . . stopped. The world began to dim at the edges of my vision. I couldn’t move. Beast couldn’t move. The might of our twined souls was stilled. My hands opened. Dropped my knives. The black light hit Baldy.

Angie reached for me. Touched the river stone rune of power on my neck. I felt the ward rise around us. Around the marines and the blinded and dead vampires. But the red motes still attacked. Not me. Not the children. Not the vamps. Only the humans. I was thankful I couldn’t hear the screaming, my ears deafened by the carnage.

Kits , Beast cried out, fighting the binding. Fighting the death that claimed me. Kits!

Angelina moved her hands again. This time to touch my face. The dark power that was hers to call shot into me. Like black lightning. Like dark life. My body shuddered. An epileptic spasm clenched down on me. Shattered through my brain. My heart beat, a single, hard, painful compression. And then another. I sucked in a breath. Dark power flowed through me. My eyes opened and I saw Angie Baby.

She giggled. “Go, Aunt Jane.”

I took in the tableau of death even as I reached for the velvet bag and the sliver of the Blood Cross. The vamp children had been freed. Had fallen on the soldiers. Drinking hard and frenziedly. Only Derek was still upright, a knife in each hand, one cutting at Tristan, the other slicing at the throat of Renee, cutting off their heads. But Derek was dying. Bleeding from too many sites to count. The red motes were embedded in his skin. Eating at his life.

The velvet bag opened. Fell to the ground. I held the sliver of wood. It was hot in my hand. Burning hot. But I held on.

Baldy stood outside Angie’s ward, legs braced wide at the north point of the pentagram. His arms out and up at the heavens, his mouth open as he spoke another wyrd. The silver and obsidian athames were in his hands pointing high.

The bloody gem was around his neck. Resting, canted, over his heart. I rolled to my feet in a single kip. Screaming my rage. From the arc of the kip, I lunged through the ward. Right hand out. Small silver of wood pointed forward. I saw the thin splinter pierce his skin. Just above the gem. In the V of the gold chain. It slid between his ribs. Pricking deep.

“A sliver of the Blood Cross,” I whispered. “For your sins.”

His eyes widened. Mouth opened. Horror slithered across his face and nested in his eyes. His blood gushed out of the wound. Over the gem. His blood linking the sliver of the Blood Cross and the gem and my hand over his heart.

Red light blasted out. Over me. Over the clearing. It crashed through me like a tsunami and I staggered. Ripped through the light of the circle ward. Smashed against the power of the pentagram and rolled over Angie’s ward, mating with it. The white light swayed, almost an audible sensation as it absorbed the red. Both seemed to grow, as if they were greater than the sum of their own energies. It was a tide. A river. An ocean. It bathed everything in bloody, brilliant light. It rolled over my head. Cleansing. It was like going to water, if water were made of blinding crimson light. It tore through me.

I pulled the sliver of the vamp’s greatest weapon from his flesh. An instant later, a bloody flame licked up from the wound. Spread over his torso in a flash. My skin went hot and I smelled my own hair burning. I rolled back fast. Smoke curled up from my hand, and I knew my fingers were burned. But I couldn’t feel the pain. Not yet.

The maker of the young rogues flamed. The heat was enormous inside the circle of red power.

I reared back and kicked out. My foot landed in the middle of Baldy’s chest. Flame kissed my boot. I kipped to my feet again and rammed Baldy with Beast-strength. The burning witch/vamp fell back, through the red light. Onto the forest floor. I whirled. There were no more vamps standing. They all were down. The heat of the burning vamp was intense, and I covered my eyes against the glare.

The soldiers were all down too, screaming and moaning. Cutting their own flesh. Even Derek, who was grunting with the motion of his knife as it flayed a length of his skin away, the muscles of his arm exposed and bleeding onto the earth. His fingers raked into the exposed muscle, fingernails digging at a mote of red light. He was chewing the tissue of his mouth, his bloody teeth working at a mote buried in his lower lip.

I looked at the sliver of wood. It was the Blood Cross. The true cross? I didn’t know. But even if it wasn’t part of the true cross, it was a powerful relic. I wiped it clean and pricked Derek. He screamed again, and the red motes burst from his skin and up into the night. Buzzing like bees, they rose in the air. Derek’s spine jerked in a whiplash of agony. He eyes cleared. “Son of a—”

I turned and pricked each of the others, even Hicklin, who had died so quickly. The red motes left their skin, formed small clouds, and rose. Joining into a hive of angry red light in the sky above us. It didn’t look like a safe place to leave them. I held the wooden sliver up at them. Nothing happened.

Angie sat up from the ground, bracing herself with one arm. “Aunt Jane, try the necklace. The one the mean man was using.”

They’d all been pretty mean to my way of thinking, but I stepped to Baldy’s smoking remains. In the center of his scorched rib cage, the bones curled up around it like protective hands, was the necklace, untouched by the heat, still bright red with blood. I wasn’t about to touch it. I pulled a silver-bladed vamp-killer and reached through the ribs with the point. Lifted it from among Baldy’s smoking vertebrae by the gold chain. It was a lot heavier than it looked.

I stood there, surrounded by gasping, bleeding men, all but one still alive, holding a vamp-killer, a powerful amulet draped across its blade. And I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. The motes in the angry cloud above me paused. I could have sworn they could hear my laughter and were responding to it. They formed a long, ropy shape, and spiraled down. Right toward the bloody gem hanging on the knife blade. They coalesced into a cloud around the now-scarlet gem. And melted inside it.

Their passage made the gem swing and pulse as if it were alive. And for all I knew, it was.

In my other hand, the sliver of wood glowed with a white light.