Cross wonders if that makes sense to him. It doesn't.
They run over sharp stones and up the sides of barren brown hills. The pink and gray sky melts beneath shadows and black clouds that smother everything in an ebon wave.
It destroyed me, Lucan says. It destroyed my body, but what is left of my primal spirit still lives, scattered. It was thrown like shards of glass through the night. Some of those shards stuck to other creatures, like you, and Ekko, and Danica Black.
Mages, Cross realizes. Two mages, and another who touches spirits. All of them had been in close proximity to Lucan and the Sleeper during the battle over the lake.
The Sleeper…
Lives, Lucan explains. It comes for you now, to finish you off. It is afraid. We can hurt it…we can imprison it again. Not many souls such as mine exist. It wants you destroyed. All of you.
The shadow leaks into the furthest reaches of the sky.
But most of all, it searches for my master. She is the one who presents the most present danger to the Sleeper’s freedom. She is the woman that you were sent to find.
The Woman in the Ice…
Cross growled as he woke. Despair crushed him.
I didn't ask for this. Any of this.
But neither had Dillon.
His bones had re-knit themselves. His muscles burned like they'd been cut and dipped in salt, but he could function, and he could move. He could fight.
Ekko had reached out to him psychically, and infected him. The vampire’s telepathic bond with Cross made him feral and bloodthirsty, but it also gave him incredible regenerative capabilities. He didn't want to test its limits, but he knew that before long he would have to. He only hoped that Ekko's captors didn't find a way to block the connection. It had been foolish to speak with Ramsey about Ekko's being Turned, but it had been the only way for Cross to be sure of what was happening to him.
He rose. There was a sharp, almost tearing pain buried deep in his stomach. He wondered if there wasn’t some internal damage, something that couldn’t be fixed by either his spirit or Ekko’s vampiric power.
Not long ago he would have worried that the pain was an effect of the food and drink they’d given him. He knew that it was tainted: there had never been any question regarding that. They wouldn’t want him at full strength except during the duels in the arena.
But now that’s out of their hands, he thought with grim satisfaction. Now Ekko heals me, and she purges those poisons out of my system, just like a spirit would.
Cross tried not to think too much about the fact that he benefitted from a vampire’s power, that it was the strength of creatures he hated to the core of his being that now allowed him to carry on when he should have already failed.
His heart burned with anger, and he pushed himself until his muscles burned with pain. He ran back and forth, pushed off of the walls with his booted feet. He stayed twice as long in the plank position, and pushed his body to its limits. He didn’t tire. He punched the air until his arms were so sore from motion that he couldn’t move. It didn’t matter. His body would heal before his next battle.
He wasn’t sure how it worked, exactly. He felt no thirst for blood, no ravenous hunger like a vampire’s victims were supposed to feel when they were Turned, or when they were in the process of being Turned. But hatred fueled him: hatred for vampires, for the leaders of Krul…and hatred for Danica Black. The rational part of his brain knew that he couldn’t kill her, if for no other reason than the fact that he needed her. If what was left of Lucan, those bits of his ancient soul, had indeed bonded with Cross and Ekko and Black, she had to live.
But not for one second longer than is necessary, he promised himself.
He went through his motions, through thrusts and parries and dodges. Cross battled imaginary foes. He worked himself to a sweat. He drank water, and at some point was given food, real food, a metal bowl filled with strips of cured pork and beef and a crust of bread along with a jug of purple wine. He devoured it all, and licked the juices from his aching fingers.
It was difficult to slow his mind down. He had to determine how they would escape. They had to save the Woman in the Ice. If she fell, the Dra’aalthakmar, the Sleeper, would raze the cities of the Southern Claw and the Ebon Cities alike, and while Cross didn’t give two shits about the vampires he didn’t want to be the man who’d failed humankind. There had to be a way out, and one that didn’t rely on Danica Black. He knew now that they would never be released, no matter how well or how many times they fought.
Cross fell onto the cot, exhausted. Bright sunlight seeped through the high bars of the door, and the air was sticky and hot. It would be some time still before nightfall. He allowed his body to rest, even though his mind continued to race and rage.
He stands on an ashen peak. The night sky is vast and starless. The wind is bitter with the taste of glacial salt, and so cold it makes the air brittle. Cracks in the ground threaten to widen and swallow him up.
The mountaintop is surrounded by a void. It is an island of ruined stone in a sea of endless night. The ground shifts beneath his feet like a raft lost in an inky sea.
The Sleeper is there. It is a thick and charnel presence, a smoking husk of primordial rage and defiled power.
His feet kick mounds of dust like fine black snow as he circles, trying to gain advantage against a foe that can likely destroy him with ease. The Sleeper manifests a physical presence. It is a tall and thin shadow of bladed edges and serpentine limbs, with eyes like dead stars. Cross tries to lock his eyes onto its form, but his mind burns from the effort. The Sleeper is an inconstant, an eye-numbing haze in the vague semblance of a giant.
He realizes he does not face the shadow alone. His spirit hugs painfully against his skin, like armor made from shards of broken steel. There are two others there with them atop the thin spire of crumbling rock, standing next to him at the foot of a Stygian titan.
One of them is Ekko, pale and bloody, her eyes dead crimson, her hands replaced with thick claws encased in iron gauntlets.
The other is Danica Black. Her katars are as ebon as her armor, and the fresh scar around her right eye is bloody and raw. She looks at Cross, and he looks back, their eyes direct doorways into their tainted souls.
Even with that brief connection, that understanding, they both know there will be more blood spilled between them. And that only one of them will survive.
He was shaken awake by vampire sentries. His vision swam, and his head throbbed with pain. The runes on his forearms pulsated with bloody purple light, and for the first time Cross realized it wasn't the food or drink that kept him in a dreamlike state, but the arcane runes that had been cast onto his skin. They made him more susceptible to the vampire’s control and suggestion. It occurred to him that those runes might have been how Ekko had managed to maintain their empathic vampire bond — the shards of Lucan’s soul that had embedded themselves in Cross, Black and Ekko in the wake of his apparent destruction had established a link between the three living mages, but these mind-weakening runes had in their own way perpetuated it. If not for them, Cross doubted Ekko ever would have been able to reach out and telepathically infect him at all.
Telepathic vampirism. I’ve officially heard it all.
Cross was fit into his armor by withered zombie hands. His gauntlet was clamped onto his hand and his blade was strapped to his back. His spirit cooled against his skin like a soothing vapor.
He cleared his mind. He was brought again to the arena. The trip was clearer this time. The controlling runes were losing their efficacy. He saw the stone halls wrought in blood-spattered stone. They were lined with the cells of other condemned prisoners, their eyes vacant and hollow, their faces grim, sucked of all life. Each of those condemned inmates looked as dead on the outside as he felt on the inside.