Free Blood Skies by Steven Montano

never been good at growing a beard. Snow said he had a baby face, that he looked even younger than twenty-six.
    His spirit swirled around him due to how agitated as he was. He’d been asked to wait while Morg and Winter conferred with some others whose identities Cross could only guess at. Based on the nature and sensitivity of their mission, Cross guessed that most of the senior officers would be in attendance, which would mean Pike, Argus, and maybe even Jericho, the ranking officer in Thornn. As far as the whereabouts of the rest of Viper Squad – Graves, Kray and Stone – Cross had no idea. As far as he knew, they were supposed to be there for the briefing along with him.
    Something is wrong . The idea gnawed at him. There was so much at stake – the lives of everyone, really, and the future of not only Thornn but perhaps the entire Southern Claw Alliance. The White Mother and her advisors were taking no chances. Cross hated not knowing what was going on. He hated being kept there, waiting.
    The air seemed to grow colder the longer he waited. He heard moans from the medical wing: soldiers felled in recent skirmishes, sent back to Thornn by airship to receive the best medical support in all of the Southern Claw. A dying patient screamed somewhere beyond the massive oak doors that led out of the hall. Cross wondered if it was someone he knew.
    Thornn was one of the largest cities in the Southern Claw, in part because of its plentiful supply of both magical and mundane resources but also due to its stockpile of experts, whether they were arcanists, historians, engineers, doctors or scientists. After The Black, when the world was falling to pieces and scattered refugees were forced to do everything they could just to stay alive, the enigmatic creature who would later come to be known as The White Mother scoured the world. She’d searched not only for survivors, but for the right survivors: people who could help remake civilization, people whose knowledge and abilities would help carve some sort of future out of a place that had become a cesspool of nightmares, mutants and death. There was no telling how the White Mother had known who to select or how to find them, but it was a known and accepted fact that she was not human herself; rather, she was a creature that came over from another world during The Black. The White Mother was a being as formidable, as ancient and as powerful as her opposite, the Grim Father, Lord of the Ebon Cities and the enemy of all humankind.
    No one ever met the White Mother. She worked through intermediaries, and left the governing and direct leadership of the Southern Claw Alliance to its own.
    To people like Red.
    The nearest door opened. Cross caught a glimpse of the massive hospital chamber, a vault of columns and steps and plinths, each taken up by one or more beds surrounded by sheets and curtains, surgical tables and tubes, medical engines and healing turbines, and row upon row of the injured. The hospital guests were victims of the vampires of Rath, casualties in the field skirmishes and small-scale battles that took place far to the west. Most of the wounded in those battles were sent to Ath, but when Ath’s hospitals began to run out of beds they were re-routed to Thornn. A glimpse was all it took to see why Rikeman, the head surgeon, rarely got any sleep.
    Cross saw him limp into the hall. Rikeman was a gaunt man in gray fatigues who wore a thin beard and had surprisingly muscular arms. His surgical gloves were stained with blood, and he looked bone weary with exhaustion. Rikeman’s limp came from the magical brace he was forced to wear over his left leg, an uncomfortable looking hunk of cold iron set with switches, dials, gauges and heavy leather and chain straps that held it in place. Thin trails of ice-cold steam escaped from the joints of the leg brace, exhaust from the arcane engine that kept a magical disease in Rikeman’s leg stable so that it wouldn’t spread and destroy