Ghost Soldiers (10 page)

The valley below was inaccessible by road, the clearing bordered on all sides by trees and thick undergrowth. An area about fifty meters across had been dug up, the earth turned over and tamped flat again. Farther out, the wild grasses had been mown all the way to the trees. The entire scene was bathed in eerie green light from three huge bonfires thirty or so feet apart and arranged in a triangle. Green flames—Xiesha might've known how they managed that. The ground had been painted with strange symbols in chalk or salt, some of them large enough to see with the naked eye even from up here. Long, perfectly straight lines of ash cut out of the trees from the north and from the west and intersected directly between the three bonfires.

He spoke softly into his mike. “The ash lines, they mark the path of ley lines?”

“Yep. Two major ones cross there,” she answered. “Vali said this spot was specially chosen.”

“Mountain police?”

“I'm monitoring their radio bands. A patrol went down our road about thirty minutes ago, and they won't be back for awhile. We should be good until the shooting starts. And then I don't need to tell you about the gates of Hell opening, the four horsemen, bleach and ammonia mixing, and all that utter chaos forever and ever, amen.”

Karl didn't reply. Encrypted communications or not, Bailey loved to chatter, but now her words sounded hollow and forced. He returned his attention to the scene visible through the riflescope, searching for Cojocaru. A group of twelve people stood in ranks beyond a pattern of curving lines and crescents. Each wore identical red long-sleeved tunics with a bright yellow sun surrounded by orange flames emblazoned on their chests. Their pants were red and tucked into black boots, and each wore a blood-red cloak and hood. Very medieval-esque, with the cloaks and the emblems. He scanned their faces with the scope, finding both men and women of a wide range of ages. Each of them wore a gold collar clamped around the throat with a cat's-eye jewel in the center just like the one on the infiltrator he'd found murdered.

He swept the scope farther around the clearing's perimeter. The rest of the creatures were a wild clash of nasty species, gray-skinned Nassid, shadowlings and more, but each wore the same slave collar. He sighted in on one of the three werewolves loping along the edges of the green firelight. The werewolf was in its wolfbreed form—the upright man and wolf hybrid they preferred for combat—and lifted its muzzle to scent the air, but Karl was far enough away to be safe from their keen noses.

A succubus swooped low from time to time, her dark wings like black smoke pouring from between her shoulders. She was a high-priority threat because she could fly.

He counted dozens of ghouls, their gray flesh sewn with heavy black stitches and their skin ritually scarified. None of them had cheeks or lips, so he could peer right through to their jawbones and sharpened teeth. He hated ghouls. He'd killed one once below a tavern in London and burned the place down along with it.

Another flying creature skip-hopped with a bird-like strut—something very thin with a human body, black wings for arms and the head of a raven. No vampires, though. Or not that he'd seen so far.

He silently cursed the Thorn for allowing him no other weapons except the .50 caliber rifle. His SIG-Sauer, his silver knife or any other secondary weapon would've made him less vulnerable. He didn't even have a spotter next to him, watching his back and able to give support with an assault rifle. If he missed or somehow failed to kill Cojocaru, he'd have hell crashing down on his head, with only his claws and fangs to fight back against so many. Grim business no matter how he looked at it.

Was it paranoid to suspect the Order of the Thorn didn't mean for him to come out of this in one piece?

“How did he gather all these?” he asked.

Bailey's voice cut in through his headset. “He's been gathering them from all over Eastern Europe and Asia. Without the collars, he can't maintain cohesion and control. Kill Cojocaru and they'll fall to fighting each other or escaping, and we'll use the chaos to get our asses out of here.”

Two ghouls dragged a prisoner out of the tree line to a log set into the ground so it thrust up like a telephone pole. Karl shifted the crosshairs onto the prisoner, and his lips pulled back from his fangs by reflex. A male vampire. Black hair. A haunting face, lean, coyote-like, with glowing, desperate eyes. No slave collar for him.

The ghouls bound him to the pole. No possible way regular rope could hold back a vampire. Karl dropped the crosshairs down to examine it more closely. He could see a green shimmer coming off the ropes and flashes of black sparks fell from the twisted hemp surface. So they were spelled somehow. It had to be the vampire who'd killed the girl on the road. But why no collar, and why were there no other vampires in Cojocaru's army?

“What do you know about the vampire?” A suspicion had already begun to form in his mind. Rituals like this had been tried before, mixing the power of the undead with a sorcerer's skills. The undead lord at the cold heart of the Dracula legends was said to be one such vampire sorcerer. Other ancient stories told of the ancestors of vampire kin, claiming them able to wield great power following their escape from a city called Entropy, a metropolis brooding on the edge of Hell. Myths and rumors and half-truths obscured by time.

There was a long pause and then a click in his ear as Bailey came back on. “Cojocaru earned his death sentence not just for making slaves and killing people. Vali kept reporting he was fascinated with vampires, especially the Master-sireling connection.” Another pause. “We think he wants to replace the collars with some kind of vampire link to his slaves, maybe even becoming undead himself.”

“Why not use the werewolves?”

“No,” she said quickly. “The Bond between wolves in the pack isn't strong enough. He's all about
compelling
his slaves. The wolves only have a bastardized version of the Master-sireling link—a kind of telepathy, but no compulsion.”

“You kept silent about this.”

“Lord Sokoll classed it need-to-know only. And I didn't think it even possible.”

He didn't answer because something caught his attention through the scope—something pacing around the feet of the vampire. He tracked it in the crosshairs. It had the shape of a house cat but its body appeared to consist entirely of black flames flickering green at the tips. A feline burning bush, unconsumed by the flames. Its eyes were real cat's eyes, a brilliant yellow, huge in a face of shifting fire.

“I've got Cojocaru.” Bailey's voice crackled over the headset. “In motion through the ranks, moving east toward the vampire. Repeat, positive ID on primary target, over.”

It took Karl a moment to dial in on him. Cojocaru was wrapped in a red cloak like the others, but he'd pushed back his hood, revealing his face. The same severe features Karl remembered from the photo on Bailey's screen. The ex-military man who'd sicced his ghouls, Nassid and wolves on those humans who'd had the bad luck to stumble across his path. The sorcerer who, according to the Thorn, was just another cold-blooded would-be tyrant, wanting to control, eager to coalesce power around himself, and using the strength of others to do so. Karl had seen the same thing happen in the world for hundreds of years. Nothing ever changed. He settled his finger on the rifle's trigger.

The ranks of acolytes swept aside to let Cojocaru pass. When he passed the last row, the succubus came floating down and landed next to him. She ran her hands over his chest, wrapping her sensuality around her with every liquid movement. Cojocaru ignored her, staring off at something beyond the edges of the scope. She smiled, her slit-eyes flashing, as she drew down the black cords tying his cloak and slipped it off him. As in the photo, he wore a Soviet-era full dress military uniform beneath his cloak—olive-drab service jacket, matching trousers with a red stripe, high black riding boots, shoulder boards with two gold stripes and three silver stars.

Cojocaru walked across the clearing past the bonfires. The fire cat ran to his side and padded along beside him. Waves of power pulsed off Cojocaru, strong enough for Karl to sense even from this far away. The sorcerer must've been shielding himself before because there was no missing it now.

He tracked Cojocaru with the crosshairs, leading him as he moved, five minutes of angle lead on a walking man at four hundred meters. He waited for the ideal shot. He wasn't confident enough in his shooting to risk sniping at a moving target, even from this close. The feeling of
wrongness
—there since he'd first seen the vampire…no, since he'd learned the Thorn wanted him to press on despite the risk the mission was blown—intensified, crystallizing into a hard spiked ball in his chest. Even if he hit with his first shot and killed Cojocaru, how did the Thorn expect him to survive the ensuing firestorm? Bailey believed his followers would fight each other or flee if Cojocaru died, but what assurance did Karl have of that? The Thorn held all its cards close. So how much did he trust them now?

Simple. He didn't.

Cojocaru lifted his head and scanned the barren mountain peaks. Then, for the briefest second, he seemed to stare straight at Karl through the riflescope. Impossible. A trick of perspective. Cojocaru's smile was nothing more than a razor slash above his jaw.

“I'm scrapping the mission,” Karl said into the mike.

“What?” Bailey sounded half-choked.

“It's a suicide mission. It's over. I'm pulling out.”

“You don't have that authority!”

“Too much of this is off. Everything's wrong. They know we're here.”

“You have a shot. Take it.”

He didn't answer. He stared through the crosshairs at Cojocaru. The sorcerer had returned his gaze to the vampire bound to the pole.

“There's not going to be another chance like this,” Bailey warned. “Karl, you have to shoot.”

Cojocaru stopped in front of the vampire, standing close enough that Karl could see both of them in the field of the scope. His hand lifted and paused just inches from the vampire's throat. A deep black aura flared around Cojocaru's hand, and a swarm of black particles lifted off his skin like flies.

Bailey cut in again, her words rapid. “Karl, this isn't a fucking game. You've got to think about what you're risking. Think of who you're doing this for.”

He didn't answer.

“There's no second chance,” she said.

Cojocaru said something, his lips moving rapidly. Karl had him in a three-quarter side view, the crosshairs on his neck. If the shot hit high, it would obliterate Cojocaru's head. If it hit low, it would rip through his rib cage deep into his chest cavity. At this distance he shouldn't lose very much muzzle velocity to air resistance, and a fifty caliber round would impact with enough force to feed plenty of Cojocaru's blood to the ground. Karl's finger settled on the curve of the trigger. He gently put two pounds of pull on the trigger—a pound more and the rifle would fire.

Cojocaru settled his hand around the vampire's neck, not a choke, but touching as if he searched for a pulse that couldn't be there.

Karl squeezed the trigger so delicately the sudden recoil of the rifle came almost as a surprise. The rifle roared, the barrel pulled back, and he felt the hard kick against his shoulder. The acrid stink of burned gunpowder filled his nostrils. The gunshot began to echo off the mountains all around him.

The bullet was a fifty-caliber silver-jacketed iron-core round. It never touched Cojocaru. The strange burning cat changed shape, and its black-green flames flared up in a brilliant wall of fire. He saw a white flash of light in the center of the fire and another boom echoed back to him. The wall of flames died down, and he could see Cojocaru through the scope again. Untouched. Unhurt. Again seeming to stare right back at him, though that was impossible. In the darkness, at this distance, he
couldn't
have seen the sniper nest. Still, Cojocaru smiled.

“
He's not down!
” Bailey screamed across the com. “Shoot again!”

Karl aimed the crosshairs between Cojocaru's eyes and fired again. The same hard recoil, the same rifle roar. The same sparking explosion of white as the cat's fire flared up and swallowed the bullet, destroying it before it reached the sorcerer.

Karl swung the crosshairs over to the vampire bound to the pole. The third round in the clip was also silver and sanctified with holy water and spells. He stared for a second at the vampire, taking in his wide red eyes, the confusion on his pale face, and then he thought of the dead girl in the car with the fang punctures in her neck. He pulled the trigger again.

He lost the vampire's face as the gun recoiled, but when he sighted in again he saw the remains. The round had blown apart most of the vampire's head and exploded a chunk of the log into splinters. What little remained of his head started to unravel into drifting black smoke, motes trailing away like snowfall as the vampire's body disintegrated. The black blood that had splattered all across the pole smoked as it evaporated.

Crosshairs back on Cojocaru. No smile now. The sorcerer's features contorted with rage. He shouted something impossible to hear at this distance after gunfire, and he pointed toward Karl. Karl moved his eye from the scope and saw the creatures and acolytes in the clearing surging toward him in a dark wave. He sighted in on the closest of them—one of the Nassid. Gray skin, yellow eyes, a black braid streaming out behind it like the tail of a kite, strung with sharpened bits of bone. So much for easy, motionless targets. Karl led it slightly, aiming center of mass. He squeezed the trigger, and the Nassid died as the round ripped a huge hole in its chest and exploded out the other side. It went down in a shuddering, flailing tangle, its arms lashing the ground, its twitching feet gouging the dirt.

“Get out of there, Karl!” Bailey yelled. The speaker in his earpiece broke up into static.