Sword and Shadow (11 page)

“What do you mean?” She frowned hesitantly, as if coming close, but not quite grasping what he was talking about.

He shrugged and glanced over at the two humans, who were looking a little worse for wear. A huge dark bruise stained the side of Gabon’s face like a huge ink blot pressed into his flesh. Bryon held his left arm cradled in his other hand as if his elbow had suffered some injury. “This www.samhainpublishing.com 101

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isn’t the time to discuss it,” he murmured. “We need to find someplace to hole up for a while. I don’t necessarily need rest, but they certainly do.”

Val followed his gaze and felt her heart lurch in her chest. Bryon’s face was a mask of pain and Goban’s steely resolve did nothing to veil his exhaustion. They’d had about all they could take. The monsters had not been kind to them.

Cerberus plopped over and sprawled across the floor, panting violently. Raven broke into a smile as he crouched down next to the dog and thumped him lightly along the ribs. “You okay, boy?”

The beast uttered an affirmative grunt and rolled onto his back, giving the vampire a look that said, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted his belly scratched. The vampire complied, shooting an uncharacteristic grin her direction. “Dogs.”

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Chapter Fifteen

Morrigan cast a transit tube through the hull of the ship, emerging into a large, curved corridor that wound gradually around its outside edge. She glanced to either side, and then went left; trotting at a good clip down the corridor until she came to a black steel door on the interior wall shaped like a ship’s hatch. She pressed a hand against the cold dark alloy, shook her head, and kept going.

Something about this place screamed wrongness, and what bothered her the most was that she couldn’t get a handle on it. There was an alien aspect to it all, but nothing obvious, nothing she could point to and say

‘well, of course that’s not a human thing.’

It had been built to human scale, she admitted, but something about the angles, about the way everything was laid out, whispered to her of uncanny origins. It was no ship of Earth Prime. That much seemed certain. In some respects the technology seemed a bit more clunky, less sophisticated, like a starship twentieth-century humans from Earth might have constructed had they the ability.

And maybe that was it. Perhaps she was subconsciously picking up that it had been built on an Earth with technology slightly ahead of her own—or what she, as well as the rest of the immortals, had grown to think of as ‘her own.’ At the time, at least.

But that didn’t make any sense either. This ship had been here for a while. Perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of years. It was true, she knew, that some worlds had advanced much, much faster than Earth Prime had, but the vague feeling of alien-ness made her question that assumption. Though it might look like it, she felt almost certain this wasn’t a human ship.

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But then whose was it? Odin and Tyr may have made use of it, they may have been protecting it, but she thought it unlikely either of
them
had anything to do with its origins, or its arrival here. It wasn’t impossible, of course. Just damned unlikely.

She passed another couple of doors, pausing a moment to inspect the second of them. She frowned at the smell of something rank. She reached for the latch for just a moment before pulling her hand back.

She didn’t really want to go in there, did she?

Not particularly. She wouldn’t find Odin down here—doubtlessly he’d fled to the top of the spires reaching skyward rather than lurking here within easy reach. He might be arrogant, but he wasn’t stupid. Seeing some slender whip of a boy defeat Tyr so easily must’ve come as quite a shock.

Morrigan knew of Raven, though she’d never met him personally.

She’d never felt the urge. There was no reason for their paths to have crossed. At the time she’d been a simple human assassin, or, at least, that was what she’d worked very hard to appear. As long as she raised no flags as a paranormal or preternatural, she was pursued by ordinary feds rather than the supernatural kind. And, predictably, managed to avoid them without much effort.

Raven had been a preternatural Fed. He’d hunted monsters, not human assassins. The vampire community had held him in something akin to awe—he may have single-handedly saved thousands of human lives by virtue of being the very creature the that terrified the things that went ‘bump’ in the night. She’d heard enough stories to know exactly how true that was. The very mention of his name could send some denizens of the night scurrying for cover.

Then came the War. Under the guidance of his friend Ben Dalmas, Raven had trained several teams of undead soldiers as support for the regular troops. Vampires made incredible scouts, infiltrators, and assassins, and, in the darkness, nothing the Cen could field in any numbers had any hope of surviving the onslaught.

Odin, of course, knew nothing of any of this. All he would know was that he’d somehow underestimated the ‘boy,’ and his long-time friend 104

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and companion lay dead on the ice because of it. The One-Eyed was probably trying to put as much distance between himself and Raven as possible until he could figure out his next move.

That’s what Morrigan would do, and Odin was at least as smart as she was.

No, if Odin was still here, he’d be up as high as he could get. She wasn’t about to waste time mucking around down here on the lower levels. She wanted to talk to the old bastard before Raven caught up to him.

The vampire lifted his gaze to the door at the same time as Cerberus.

They both stared at the hatch for a long moment before allowing their heads to sink once more, the dog’s onto his paws, Raven’s onto his chest.

He’d been drowsing, in some half-alert state, but he knew he’d heard the faintest scuff of feet in the corridor beyond the door.

Whoever—or whatever—had paused there had continued on its way.

He was glad of it, for, despite what he’d told the others, he was flat exhausted. He required rest, both physical and mental, as much as any mortal—even if he could probably go longer than the average without any.

It was worse when the sun was in the sky above, producing a kind of lethargy that dragged down at him with the weight of all his two hundred plus years. Here, in this place, it only lasted but a brief time, but just fighting through it just flat wore him out.

He dozed.

Val woke suddenly, unsure of what had disturbed her until she pried her eyes open to slits and watched as Goban prowled the edges of the small laboratory, poking his nose into various cabinets and curiously examining a number of the vials and flasks he found within them. What struck her most odd was that he seemed to be studying them as if he www.samhainpublishing.com 105

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knew something about them, or at least had some measure of familiarity with chemicals in general.

Strange,
she thought, following him with her slitted gaze. Until this moment she’d never felt the slightest bit suspicious of the man—she’d trusted him and liked him as much as Raven seemed to. But this behavior was nothing short of astounding.

She slid her gaze around to Raven and saw him also watching the former mercenary through his slitted, violet eyes.

They watched as Goban puttered around the lab, moving with stealth, but seemingly oblivious to the others in the room.

What the hell was the man doing?

Bryon rolled over with an audible groan and Goban’s gaze snapped to him. He set the beaker into which he was currently peering back into its slot in a rack on the counter and crossed the room to his former position, sinking down to sit against the wall. Within seconds he appeared to be back asleep.

Raven and Val exchanged glances.

The vampire stood with effortless grace, making the very act of standing look like something sliced from a dance. He scanned the room, taking in the lab equipment and his companions with a thoughtful expression. “Okay, everyone! Time to move!”

Raven found himself distracted by the question of what Goban had been doing while he thought they were sleeping. The whole thing had seemed so out of character and it puzzled him. He led the party along the curved corridor, passing at least a dozen more hatches leading into the interior before coming upon one that was obviously different. It was a stark red the color of dried blood and fitted with what looked to be a security or control panel about halfway up the left side. The panel was dissected by five rows of five buttons each, all of which were marked with an unfamiliar glyph—most likely numbers in some alien script. Raven grunted irritably. The translator device most agents wore but he disdained didn’t do anything in the way of translating text—spoken language only.

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Raven’s skill with security devices was questionable anyway, even without added complications. He shot a look over his shoulder at Val.

“Can you do anything with this?”

She leaned forward, peered at it, and shrugged. “Possibly. It’s probably based on digital technology, which gives me a good chance. If they went with some sort of quantum arrangement I could spend days at it, though.” She frowned. “Why don’t you just magic us through the door?”

Raven shook his head. “Uh-uh. I didn’t mention it before, but this whole damn ship, from what I can tell, is lousy with wards. Something as simple as a transit tube in the wrong place and all hell could break loose.”

She gave him a skeptical look but could only sigh—if he said it, she had to believe him. An alien ship into which was bound a thousand malevolent spells seemed incredible. But his eyes were somber as he stepped back and allowed her access to the security panel.

Probing at it gingerly, she looked for a latch opening into its innards, and, after a moment, had to admit to herself that it wasn’t going to be that easy after all. “Nano-locked. I’m going to have to find a way to break the code.”

He blinked at her, then nodded curtly. Not for the first time, she wished she knew what was going on behind those violet orbs. Not only didn’t her psychic gifts tell her anything about his internal workings, but his almost utter lack of anything approaching normal human body language left her deeper in the dark than anyone she’d ever met.

The man was an enigma.

It took her fifteen minutes to break the code. She hit the last key and turned back to Raven with a grin as the door hissed open, revealing what looked to be a solid wall of black.

He flashed her a quick grin and motioned her back, then stepped into the darkness and disappeared.

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She suppressed a sudden shiver. It was just a lift—wasn’t it?

Hesitantly, she reached out, her fingers just brushing the ebon wall. A numbing shock ran up her arm and she gasped, falling back.

Bryon lunged forward and caught her the moment her knees buckled while Goban and Cerberus looked on, their expressions oddly similar.

Mildly curious but not particularly worried about anything.

Suddenly the dog spun on the shadowy portal, giving one booming bark.

It was like stepping into a vertical pool of ice, a shock so sudden it was almost painful. He strode through purposely, gritting his teeth against the pain, and emerged into some place that was
not
the interior of a lift.

His feet brushed softly against the alloy decking, ringing gently off the distant bulkheads.

His first thought was that he’d somehow stepped into one of the ship’s cargo bays. And he wasn’t alone. He heard something moving somewhere in the darkness ahead and sniffed at the air. His vision, while far greater in the dark than any mortal’s, was equally as stymied in the pitch dark of this place.

The scent that reached him had a fierce, unfamiliar stink, a musky, biting odor that made his nostrils twitch. The sound of something heavy, something with scales, dragging itself across the deck sent him into a diving roll to his immediate left. Something struck the wall behind where he’d stood—a screech of talons scoring alloy and a shriek of unmistakable rage.

It hit the deck hard, claws biting into the alloy as it spun.
It’s fast.
He could feel something massive moving in the darkness, rushing up on him like a freight-train through the infinite night of a mountain tunnel.

He started to twist away, but not quite fast enough. The creature clipped him, sending him spinning across the floor with enough force he nearly lost his balance. He crouched there in the crushing black, waiting for it to move…to do anything.

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Could it out-wait him? All things being equal, it was doubtful. But, he had to admit, things
weren’t
equal. He had others depending on him.

Which didn’t leave him that much choice. He was screwed.
Unless…

Shaking his head at his own stupidity, he switched to magesight, which brought everything into sharp relief. The air around him was thick with mana, far more than he would have expected out here in the middle of nowhere. The ambient light of the threads cast an eerie glow around the massive chamber, revealing a great reptilian beast blinking in the darkness as it tried to get a fix on him.

Some sort of very primitive dragon,
he thought. Not like the few left on Earth—they were anything but primitive. He’d met a couple during the war and, frankly, they’d scared the crap out of him. This one, fierce and feral as it was, was little more than a bobcat next to a Bengal tiger. It was probably three meters at the base of its curving neck, and over ten in length, including its long, winding tail Smiling, Raven pulled the crystal sword from the dimension pocket in which he’d stashed it, and dragged it across the floor as he sidled sideways.

The creature’s copper eyes, the size of dinner plates, swiveled as it tried to focus on the source of the unfamiliar sound. Bunching its legs beneath itself, it lunged.

Raven whirled, every single nerve, muscle, and cell in his body contributing to the force he put into the blow as he drove the tip of the blade deep into the creature’s side. It let out a roar that became a hissing shriek of pain as he snatched the sword back out and used its leg to vault up onto its back. As it thrashed about furiously, he danced up its length and casually lopped its head from its long neck, leaping away as it crashed to the deck.

“Nice try!” he shouted, suspecting the whole thing had been observed from a remote location. That’s what
he
would have done, anyway.

“What’s the matter, One-Eye? You afraid of lil’ ol’ me?”

He heard a click and a voice replied out of the darkness. “I’d prefer to use the word ‘wary.’ So what
are
you?”

“Dangerous.”

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This produced a deep chuckle. “That much I could see for myself. I’m not interested in playing with you, stranger. I’m interested in getting rid of you.”

“Easier said than done, Odin. Better men than you have said the same thing.”