Soulrazor by Steven Montano Page B

quietly, “and reach out for Ekko, like she’s still there in bed next to me.” He smiled, painfully. His eyes burned into the floor. “Shit.”
    “ If there's anything you need...” Black said.
    “ Yes,” Kane said, regaining some of his composure. “Get your asses out of bed by tomorrow. Pike and Laros want to meet with us.”
    “ Jesus, already?” Cross groaned.
    “ Poor baby,” Black laughed.
    Cross watched Kane. The big man had shrugged his moment of vulnerability off, at least on the outside.
    He’s living for revenge, Cross thought. We have to help him. That will only keep him going for so long.
    “ I’m off to get some food,” Black said. “Anyone care for some meat?”
    “ That’s sort of a personal question,” Kane said with a grin.
    “ Moron.”
    “ You two enjoy,” Cross said. “I need to get some sleep.”
    He caught Danica’s eye before she and Kane left, and he tried to signal to her to keep an eye on Kane. Black seemed to understand, and she nodded. Kane wasn’t the sort of man who accepted help, or friends, easily. If he knew they were worried about him he was likely just to seal himself off even more.
    You’re not alone , Cross wanted to tell him, and he still would later if he thought it would help. We’ve all lost someone. We can’t forget them…but we can’t let our memories of them drag us down.
    Cross closed his eyes. He saw Snow, burning on the train.
    He missed Graves, and Dillon, and so many others, but it was the memory of his sister that haunted his sleep even years after she’d died. Cross felt his breaths catch in his chest, and he started to shake.
    When he opened his eyes a short time later, Black and Kane had gone.
    Good. I don’t want them to see me like this.
    Cross sat quietly, and cried. He choked down his tears so that no one would hear him.
     
    He sees the keep on the edge of the ocean. White waves rock the small boat as he desperately holds on for his life. The air is dark and violent and filled with cobalt storms, and the rain falls like knives. Streaks of dark lighting scar the sky.
    The keep is a crumbling ruin, a bastion of decaying mortar and rotting beams. Chunks of loose granite plummet into the water. The tower is cracked and open, and the inside of the keep is exposed to the waters.
    The ship sails into the ruins.
    Dark shapes move in the deeps, silhouettes of drowning people that grasp and struggle for the surface.
    He senses a presence in the dark, lost somewhere in the shadows. He sees flashes of eyes and teeth.
    The woman is there, at the far end of the open keep, waiting on the shore. She is wreathed in grey shadows that flow around her body like clouds of steam.
    He cannot see her face, and yet feels that he knows her. Her eyes are pinpricks of light in the watery gloom.
    The ship slowly chops its way toward her. A sense of dread grows in his chest and holds there, like some gritty substance he’s been forced to choke down.
    The waters are violent and the walls loom close, and he knows that at any moment he will be dashed against the stone, where he will sink and drown in the company of lost souls.
     
    Cross woke. He still saw the woman in his mind's eye, a vivid shadow with hazy diamond eyes. He shook himself to, and the image was gone.
    His head pounded, and his lips and throat burned with dehydration. Cross reached for the decanter of water on the stand next to his hospital bed, only to find that it wasn't there.
    He looked around the hospital wing, which was a vast and open space crowded with sandstone pillars and hospital beds. It was deep in the night, and the only reason Cross could even see his own hand in front of his face was because of the ambient glow of the flames that penetrated the mists from the watchtowers outside.
    The walls hummed with hex currents and bioelectric wires. Thin fog curled against the reinforced windows, and the air was cold and still. Cross smelled disinfectant and body scent.
    Something felt wrong.