Steven Montano - Blood Skies

“ This is weird for the attack to come in the middle of the city,” Graves said. Cross could only nod.

Moone, the leader of Scorpion Squad, was a gaunt and bearded man with grey hair and steely blue eyes. He was one of the senior Southern Claw officers in Thornn — only Cross’ mentor, Winter, had anywhere near as many years of service as Moone did. Moone approached them with a grim look in his eyes.

“ We were just talking about that,” Morg said. “Strange for a suck-head to attack this deep in.”

“ It had been in hiding,” Moone said in his gravelly voice. “Mother isn’t going to like this.”

“ You mind if we take a look?” Morg asked.

“ I was hoping you would,” Moone said. “I think you’ll find what’s inside…interesting.”

The bottom level of the bell tower was an open space. There were a few chairs where people could sit and rest, and a table for meals and games. Now, everything was covered in knives. There were thousands of blades, and they covered every visible surface in a sea of razor quills. There couldn’t have been more than an inch of space left between the jagged edges. It looked as if ten thousand points had been jabbed into the walls, floor, ceiling and bodies and then broken off. Morg had to kick blades out of his path just so he could step into the room.

Three corpses lay in unrecognizable heaps on the ground, their bodies perforated head to toe by the rusty blades. Shreds of clothing clung to their decimated bodies. Bloody messes of hair and skin had spread like grisly jam across the room.

“ Wow.” Cross gagged and covered his mouth with a gloved hand. The smell of opened intestines and spilled bowels filled the air with the scent of an outhouse in summer. Neither Morg nor Graves showed any such signs of being repulsed. They moved slowly, in an effort to avoid the pools of blood on the floor and not to trip on or break any more of the blades. “I haven’t seen a vampire that used weapons like this in a while.”

“ Me, neither,” Morg said.

“ We think,” Moone said from behind them, “that the suck-head had been hiding out here in the tower. This building was condemned for safety reasons a month or so ago.”

“ Sir, who are the victims?” Graves asked Moone, but it was Cross who answered.

“ Two girls, one boy,” Cross said. His spirit clung to him as if for dear life. The spirits of the victims, severed from the human hosts, were close by. He felt them in the air, and their presence made it heavy and sick. They were lost and confused, and they would try to take Cross’ spirit with them, or else claw at her and attack her in their rage and confusion. “They were just having fun,” he said as the information came to him. “They were going to do some drinking, maybe some black powder.” He swallowed. His skin was frozen, and his fingers shook. It took everything he had to keep her close, to hold her back from those lost and tormented souls. They’d be gone soon, and she’d be safe.

“ There,” Moone said, and he indicated the far wall of the downstairs room. “That’s what I wanted you to see.”

Scrawled markings covered the wall. Runes had been drawn over a rough map, and coded notes, arrows and cross-marks connected dots and triangles and pictures of what looked like eyes. The entire wall had been hidden behind a sliding panel, a removable plate secured by old magic that the vampire had apparently torn away. The map was of the northwest part of the country, and it bore location markers for the Wormwood, the Bone March and even the Carrion Rift. The markings were coded, but from what Cross could determine they seemed to be arcane calculations, geo-empathic equations and cartothaumaturgic drawings. Someone had worked out a location, a place where they wanted to go.

“ What happened here?” Morg said out loud.

“ From what we can tell, the vampire came here for this map,” Moone said. “Either he meant to read it, or to destroy it. Then these young people came along…” They stood in silence for a moment. Soldiers barked outside at bystanders to back away. “My squad got the bastard.”

“ This map,” Cross said. “I’ll need some time to decode it, but at a glance…it looks like directions.”

“ To where?” Graves asked. “And who made it?”

Cross stepped closer. It would have taken an extremely experienced mage to make those calculations, to work out the geometry and arcane algorithms. He had no idea where the raw data had come from, but the work itself was complex. Only a few mages could have done it.

“ The Wormwood,” he said. “Red made this map. And if it leads where I think it does, she’s headed for the Wormwood.”

Cross woke to a knock on his door.

It was difficult for him to actually rise from the blankets, since his head felt like it had been filled with lead before being rammed against the wall several times and left out in the sun to dry like a piece of fruit.

Light fell into the apartment in broken shards. Judging by the dull red color of the air and the cloying chill, it was just past dawn. Cross had fallen asleep face down and completely nude, which was one of the normal side effects of his drinking too much. Sadly, he rarely woke in anyone’s company. Dry mucus filled his mouth, and when he coughed Cross thought he was going to spew a mouthful of nails. His muscles were locked, and when he tried to move he almost fell off the bed.

This is why I don’t drink.

His spirit had no response. She drifted just at the edge of his thoughts. Power pulsed through him as she tried to flush his system of toxins. That power churned like boiling hot liquid in his gut. It spread through his limbs so fast he almost vomited again.

The knock on the door came again.

Oh. Damn.

“ What?!” he shouted. He didn’t know any of his neighbors, and it was rare that anyone who came to his apartment in order to summon him actually bothered to knock. He never locked the door — the runic wards over the doorway made it very clear that a warlock lived there, which was usually enough to deter most would-be human intruders. Non-human intruders actually brave enough to hunt down a warlock weren’t likely to be dissuaded by a mere door.

Whoever it was, they didn’t respond to his question. But the knock came again.

Cross blinked, let his spirit’s energies pulse through his body, and then quickly threw on his pants and picked up his HK45 from the desk. The pistol felt heavy in his hand, and the runes carved into the grip were cold against his skin. Cross walked along the rugs, waited at the door for a moment, and opened it.

A homunculus stood in the doorway with a stupid grin that was a disturbing parody of a human face. The golem was made of red clay and black brick, its eyes were slits cut over the mawkish grin, and its nose was an ill-constructed protrusion filled with arcane powders that allowed the brute to use scent to find its way around the city, since it was generally considered too expensive and foolish to provide the constructs with vision or hearing, especially with how short-lived a homunculus tended to be. They were a lesser construct, among the simpler implements that a mage could create.

“ Deliver,” Cross said, not sure if he really wanted a message sent to him so early in the day.

When a homunculus spoke, it was a magical audio recording, a reproduction of the voice of whoever sent it in the first place. Normally it was the crafter, but Cross knew that there were a few mages in Thornn who had a surplus of prefabricated golems they sold for use by whoever was willing to pay their sometimes inordinate fees.

It spoke with a woman’s voice. Cristena’s voice.

“ Sorry to track you down like this. I was wondering…well, I need to ask you something. If you’re interested, I’d like to meet with you…do you know a good place for breakfast?”