Blood Skies by Steven Montano Read Free Book Online

vampires, pale-skinned fiends who’d first come in waves, like barbarians, unorganized and hungry, seemingly as shocked by this new apocalypse world as the humans were. After a time, the vampires slowed down, grew organized, and built the Ebon Cities, and they settled in to control much of what was left of the world. There were other creatures out there in the wastelands, as well, some of them worse than the “suck heads”: the monstrous Gorgoloth, the giant and enigmatic Cruj, the black-hearted Sorn, the Vuul, the Eidolos, and the undead, scores of zombies and wights and lich and ghouls and other things that should have existed only in nightmares. But nightmares had become real, or else they’d always been real and humankind had been ignorant of the fact until The Black came along and woke them up.
    Cross wondered about that, sometimes -- if the world had always been this way, Earth convergent with other realities, and if humans had just been cut off somehow, ignorant, adrift in the sea of their own isolation. The world was different after The Black, and very few could remember what it had been like before it had all happened, before the catastrophes and the vampire invasion, before magic and caustic seas, before liquid nightmares, before cities fell into earthen maws and the sky had turned to a corrosive red haze. It was hard to remember the world that had been before half of the people had died, before giant wolves and killer trees roamed the poisonous wilderness, and before abandoned and ancient cities appeared out of nowhere, in some cases shattering other cities in the process. Multiple worlds, squeezed into one.
    But is that really what happened? he sometimes wondered. Had all of it -- the cities, the vampires, the monsters -- had it always been here, and until The Black we just couldn’t see it? Like one day…the illusion was gone?
    No one knew. That was the frightening reality. It was known that there was a time before The Black, and they were now trapped in the time after, but as the years stretched on it became harder and harder to separate the two.
    But under the guidance of the White Mother, humankind had banded together, and fortress city-states like Thornn had been built. There had been many more cities in the beginning; most of them hadn’t lasted long. Those that had endured, however, formed the Southern Claw Alliance, a confederacy of humans who worked together to survive in the brutal new world. Most of the power in the Southern Claw resided in the hands of the military, which fought off constant attacks staged by the vampires of the Ebon Cities and the other creatures from the wastelands. Most of the Ebon Cities attacks directed at Thornn were guided by an extremely old vampire known as The Grim Father, who ruled from the Ebon City of Rath, a remote place that was in many ways an undead equivalent to Thornn. Cross had never seen Rath. It was doubtful he ever would.
    The music in The Hag – old world stuff, tinny, heavy with drums and electronics, music meant to be danced to by tribal people and arcane natives who understood the workings of modern machines – blared from mystic gramophones mounted high on the dirty stone walls. Iron gates sealed the large dungeon-like room off from the rest of the world. The lighting was poorly provided by smoking lamps that had been bolted to the tables, miniature chimneys that released an acrid blend of tobacco and cinnamon and turned the atmosphere into an eye-burning haze.
    Cross and Graves secured a table near the back, where they met up with Graves’ friend Jonas, a warrior priest who could hold more liquor and stir up more trouble than Cross and Graves combined. The long-haired priest still wore his cross-emblazoned armor and his crimson cape, which made him strangely fit in well with the chamber full of mercenaries, drug addicts and slinky women.
    Cross sucked on the cigarillo Jonas gave him. He regretted ever having quit, and he knew he’d feel different