Free Black Scars by Steven Alan Montano Page B

looked like blades. The ground was dry and covered with rubble and bones that were so soft they collapsed underfoot. The air smelled cold and dirty. Streets led off to nowhere. Structures seemed to float out of the darkness, which was so deep it could have stretched for miles. They walked through a sea of night, an ink stain addled with debris.
    Less than a minute after they entered the city, Dillon slipped from his hidden position next to the camel and vanished into the shadows.
    Cross’ chest was tight. There were eyes on them, and something more: a presence, vast and ugly and overwhelming. It was foreign, not borne of that place, but at the same time deeply rooted to it. It was an intruder that had melded with the ruins themselves – something vast, and dark, and very old.
    Cross drew his HK45, and made his spirit ready. Her spectral skin smoothed over him like a warm tide. She spat at the presence that Cross had sensed. She was so miniscule compared to it, a firefly in a dark sky.
    Shadows fell over them like black dust. Decayed facades and crumbling steps and massive doorways leered at them from the edge of the black air like bitter faces.
    “ Daaaamn,” Kane muttered. His words echoed like a clap of thunder. “Sorry.” His second word carried even louder than the first, an avalanche in the dark.
    Cross looked at him, and raised a finger to his lips.
    A lantern appeared in the murk. Danica Black spurred the horse forward. They rode past rows of broken stone fence and between statues of half-eaten lupine warriors. Clumps of petrified clay littered the ground. The frost had gone gray with age. Cross smelled sage and animal musk.
    The lantern bearer waited up ahead. He was a stocky and unshaved warrior with leather armor and a chain coat, and he wore a double-barreled shotgun on his hip.
    He nodded towards an alcove behind him. It took Cross’ eyes a moment to make out the structure in the muted light – a temple that seemed to melt out of the shadows. The building was cylindrical and very tall, with crumbling columns and spiky protrusions that covered its shell like quills.
    “ Danica,” said a voice from the dark. It wasn’t the shotgun bearer, but a second man, a small and wiry individual with a goatee and a black pilot’s coat straight out of World War I. Cross thought the man looked like he should have behind the controls of a Fokker…he even wore aviation goggles. Cross couldn’t begin to fathom how the man could see anything in the impenetrable murk, unless those goggles were some sort of arcane implement. “You made it,” the aviator said with a broad smile. “Cradden was starting to worry.”
    “ Hello, Gregor,” Black said icily. “Killed any women or children lately?”
    “ Darling, you tease,” he laughed.
    “ Can we get on with it?” Vos growled.
    “ Lighten up, Vos,” Gregor said with the same salesman’s smile. “We’re all friends here.”
    “ Be that as it may,” Black said, “I’d rather take an acid bath than stand this close to you any longer than I have to, Gregor. So like Vos said…let’s get on with it.”
    Gregor’s eyes moved to Lucan. The captive warlock sat stoically in the saddle, his eyes on something that wasn’t really there. Whatever the Revengers did to keep Lucan’s immense power contained seemed to reduce the warlock to a zombie-like state.
    “ Who are your friends?” Gregor asked Black.
    “ Prisoners, and my aides.”
    “ But only one vampire,” Gregor said with a sad shake of his head.
    “ I’ll discuss that with my brother,” she said. “And no one else.”
    Gregor laughed again.
    “ You’re a bitch, Danica.”
    “ So are you, Gregor.”
    “ You go in alone,” Gregor answered.
    Cross stretched out his senses through his spirit. The looming shadow that clung to the walls of Shul Ganneth didn’t feel as oppressive as it had before; it had receded to more of a background murmur of spectral white noise rather than a roar of black sound.