Read Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) for Free Online Page B

at the sun.  The air burned, and her throat and sinuses were raw from the ignited atmosphere.  She breathed deep, straightened herself, her chest feeling hollow.  Dizziness and nausea shot through her in waves.  She heard cries of pain from up on high.
    Danica’s spirit peeled against her, weak and inconstant.  He seemed on the verge of blinking out of existence, so she immediately locked him within her arcane limb so he could heal.  It was always dangerous when opposing spirits collided, but this was worse, which led her to believe the female spirit she’d sensed wasn’t just unstable but somehow corrupted, crumbling apart because of some theurgic disease, a slowly dying spirit tied to a slowly dying man. 
    Cross leapt to his feet, dousing his armor coat where it had caught alight.  He quickly pushed inside with the shotgun, stamping out small flares as he went.  The inside of the tower was scorched and in ruins.  Judging by the expression on Cross’s face and the way he covered his arm with one hand the warlock had died, likely incinerated when the spirits fused in that deadly blast.  Cross looked up the inside of the citadel and pointed towards the apex, indicating that he was heading up to investigate. 
    Danica checked Shiv and Ronan while Cross was inside and was relieved to see they were both unharmed since they’d been shielded by the alley, though she did have to stamp a small blaze away from the edge of Ronan’s makeshift sled.  The air crackled with the still-burning flames that had landed on the cobblestone, and even though there seemed little danger of the fire spreading the explosion had made tremendous noise.  She trained the G36C on the street and kept her eyes on the red-black sky, half-expecting Razorwings or Shadowclaws to suddenly appear like they’d been lying in wait the entire time. 
    Cross emerged from the smoking husk of the tower a few minutes later with a burned and dying man in his arms.
    No , Danica thought.  The boy was fifteen years old, maybe.
    Whatever the boy’s skin had once been he was black now, scorched dark and rasping for breath.  The charred flesh seemed to float on top of the muscle as if separated by a layer of liquid, leaking red ooze through cracks that looked less like wounds and more like fractures on some dark and crusted earth.  The stench of burning was thick, even from a distance.
    “Help...” he coughed, and Danica was about to release her spirit to heal him when the boy died.  Blood spurted from his mouth and sizzled as it struck his chest. 
    “ Shit,” Cross said.  “I tried to get down here as fast as I could...”
    Danica watched the boy and felt tears budding in her eyes, which she knew was just ridiculous.  When she was a Revenger she’d condemned entire communities and had the families sent to Black Scar to be slowly put to death by working in the red diamond mines.  And it wasn’t as if this was some innocent – he was a scavenger, like so many others she’d run across over the years, and if they hadn’t gotten him he’d have shot them and looted their corpses for whatever scraps of food or ammunition he could find. 
    That doesn’t change the fact that I just murdered a child.
    Cross waited a few moments before he took up his gun again and went and checked on Shiv and Ronan, doing as Danica had and watching the roads and sky for signs of trouble.  It was possible the only reason they’d made it as far as they had was because they’d maintained a low profile in spite of their ungainly method of travel, but an arcane explosion there in the middle of Thornn would change all of that. 
    Danica watched the boy, as if waiting for an explanation.  Her flesh arm was shaking, but she didn’t know why.  She had a suspicion it was more than this nameless wastelands scavenger that had her nerves on edge, but until that moment she couldn’t put a face to her fears, to the budding dread that had weighted in her gut like a parasite,