Ghost Soldiers (13 page)

“Karl…”

He nodded and left her, walked outside, stopped and listened anyway. He could hear Bailey clearly, but the woman's words were indistinct. Bailey gave only one-word answers until finally she called his name again. He went back inside and shut the door behind him.

Bailey had set down the satellite phone and stared at the ceiling. He knelt beside her.

“They won't get here in time,” she said very softly.

“A team is on the way.” He glanced at her wounded arm. The flesh looked no better or worse than before, but the black lines spreading out from the wound were now visible an inch above her collar.

“On the way.” She snorted. “It'll be at least fifteen, sixteen hours before they assemble, gear up, move over land and cross borders. No, they aren't coming to help me. They're coming to clean up our mess.” She looked at him. “And now they know I disobeyed a direct order.”

He said nothing.

“They know that and more. So they're not coming to save us.” She grinned at him and it was a horrible thing, full of fear and despair and a black humor far too deep for her young face. “Leads us full circle. I'm going to die.”

He almost reached out and took her hand, but stopped. He didn't know how she'd take being touched by a vampire. She'd never seemed repulsed by him, not like most of her comrades, but he found himself unwilling to risk it. His mind flitted back to Maria, to the night he'd found her dying in the kitchen, in the arms of Delgado, his most hated enemy. God was cruel. Over and over he stood sentinel at the side of dying women.

He leaned closer to her. “What can I do?”

“Thought you'd never ask.” She lifted her good hand and caught his. Her flesh was cool—nearly as cold as his own. She fixed him with her green eyes. “Turn me.”

He let go of her hand. “No.”

A storm of emotions flickered across her face, fear and anger the most prevalent. She swallowed and her throat made a clicking sound. “Why?”

“You don't know what you're asking.”

“Turn me into a vampire. It'll stop this spell from eating me alive. It'll heal me.”

He shook his head. “There's no guarantee it'll heal you. There's no telling how it would react to these wounds.”

“I'll take that chance. Please.”

“No.”

“Fuck,” she whispered.

He stared down at her. She had no idea. Killing the sentient to slake a thirst never completely satisfied. Severed from everything good in the universe, forced to walk the darkness. Hell, the boredom of centuries watching humanity make the same mistakes time and again. The sun, gone forever.

No.

“You're going to kill me,” she said.

“No. I'm going to let you die.” He hesitated. “I'm sorry.”

“I want it.
I'm
making the choice. And you'll show me no mercy?”

“Mercy would be to take your sword and kill you clean.” He pointed to the crucifix hidden beneath her coat. “You're bound by oaths to all that's holy in the universe, to every path of goodness and honor and justice. Vampires were cursed an age ago, fallen into the shadow. You want me to make you pay that price?” He shook his head. “And it involves both of us. I turn you and you'll be my sireling—little better than those slaves Cojocaru keeps. You want that?”

“There are worse things. Here, I'll make it easy.” She reached up, drew out the silver crucifix around her neck and pulled it over her head. It glowed blue-white, and Karl turned away from its light. She tossed it across the room. It hit the wall and fell behind the cardboard box, and its light faded.

“I won't damn you to my fate. Corruption comes easily enough as it is. You can let go without fear.”

“There's more to the afterlife than you know, Karl Vance.” She smiled. He didn't. A spasm wracked her body, and she hissed in a breath and closed her eyes until it passed. “It's stupid to think I'd be evil just because of what I was physically.” She glared at him. “I expected more from you, I think. You seemed more intelligent.”

He stood.

“Wait, please.” She blinked. “I'm not trying to be a bitch—don't twist your panties up. Good is good—every action has weight, and something is not just evil simply because it exists. Look at you. Everything you're doing now, everything you've done since I met you, has been for the people you love. What does that say about you? You love her, right? This woman of yours back in Boston? I heard all the gossip. You love her, don't you?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “Anything that can love can be good. Listen to how wise beyond my fucking years I am. Couldn't tell cuz of the blue hair, right? I know. I know. I forgive you.”

“It's not that simple.”

“The hell it isn't. To be good and honorable is a conscious choice. Jesus. Don't make me draw diagrams.” She coughed twice and groaned. “I want to live.”

“Being a vampire isn't living.”

“I wish there was some damn light in here so I could see your face better. That had to be a joke.”

He didn't answer her.

“
Listen
to me. I'm not done living. I'm twenty-four. I never went to Africa. Never climbed a mountain. Never swam naked in the ocean. And I'm dying and it's bullshit. You don't piss away the money you have in one hand for promises you hold in the other.”

He leaned in close and spoke very softly. “Say what you want about good and evil, but every goddamned time I walk near holy ground I suffer. Every time I see some symbol of the Pure—cross, crescent, pentacle or holy sigil—it burns my eyes. I must hide from the sun. If I'm not evil, then God has a twisted sense of humor.”

“There're reasons for that. I know a bit about it. I could tell you some…but you'd have to Turn me first.”

“No.”

She shuddered and took a deep, gasping breath. “You want more? Fine. Our mission's not done. Cojocaru's still out there, killing people, enslaving everything, growing stronger. Innocent people are in danger. We have a job to do and you need me.”

“The mission failed. The Thorn betrayed me. It's over.”

“Fuck you, Karl.” A single tear slipped from the corner of her eye and ran down her cheek. She seemed to want to wipe it away, raised her injured arm by accident and screamed in pain. No other tears followed it. A moment later she whispered, “Please. I'd get on my knees, but I can't.”

He looked away, disgusted with himself, with everything. He liked her, a feeling he'd had for none of her Thorn comrades. He liked her prattle and her attitude. In some ways her spirit reminded him of Maria. She hadn't cut him loose in the forest either, instead going against her orders. But he'd sworn never to become a Vampire Master—to never make sirelings and never subject another to that kind of total dominance, total slavery. Good? How could any creature that completely enslaved another be
good
? It was obscene.

And Maria. What would she think if he Turned Bailey? Once, back when she'd been hiding under his protection from Alejandro Delgado, she'd begged him to make her
his
slave instead of Delgado's. He hadn't been able to do it. The dark magic didn't work that way, and a sireling couldn't change masters. But she'd held it against him anyway. What would happen if he returned to her with another vampire, a
female
vampire, whom he'd given the gift for which she'd begged?

“I can't. I'm sorry.”

She looked at him, but he couldn't read her expression. Her breath came in short little gasps. The black web of poison running through her veins had reached to mid-throat now. He didn't know for certain what would happen if it reached her brain, but none of his guesses were good.

“I'm not done yet.” Another smile curved on her lips, this one cold, more horrible than any before. “Still got the ace up the sleeve.” She glanced at her sleeveless right arm and the burned flesh and laughed. “When I die, the Watchers will know. And who are they gonna blame? They're coming to Romania, yeah, and not to save me. They're sending tactical teams—big guns and lots of them. You didn't kill Cojocaru. So they're also sending a vampire hunter to collect their pound of flesh. Command just dropped that one on me.” Her mouth formed a sickly, exhausted grin. “Elite of the elite, those vamp hunters are scary bastards. And they'll go after your lover back home. So deal's off. Time to pay the House.”

He stared at her, not trusting himself to speak.

“Now
there's
something,” she said. “I can finally see your glowy eyes in the dark. Must've pissed you off. I want to get my way, Karl. I want to live, and I'll do what I have to. I'd say you'd do the same.”

“You'd be wrong.”

“
C'est la vie
. But if I'm alive…or undead alive, I'll be there to keep the Thorn from killing you. They'll stay their hand. Your friends will be safe. Everybody gets a fucking cookie.”

“You lie. If you're a vampire, they'll destroy you as well.” He gave her a bitter smile. “Set you free.”

Bailey glared at him, opened her mouth to say something but started to cough, spraying a mist of blood. The coughing fit subsided, but she seemed far weaker. Colder. Her heart beat an erratic rhythm.

“Hurts…” The black lines in her veins had grown darker, a roadmap of onyx across alabaster skin. “I'm afraid…” She closed her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again and leaned toward him, grunting, her muscles trembling from strain, gasping for breath. “Maria…called for you. Before the mission went to hell. I couldn't tell you… She knew we were betrayed.” She gasped in breath again, spasms wrenching the muscles in her neck and jaw. “She said…she said she was coming to get you… I have her number…” She lifted her good arm, her body shaking, fingers twitching, and touched one to her temple. “Here.”

Her words rocked him like a sledgehammer blow. If Maria came to Romania with the Thorn knights on their way, with vampire hunters loose and Cojocaru on a rampage…

He grabbed Bailey by her coat and leaned close to her face, staring into eyes already beginning to glaze over as her heart slowed. “
Where
is she coming in? When? Goddammit, Bailey, what did you tell her? What's the number?”

Bailey's eyes fluttered and closed. A wild desperation thundered through his mind. The only thing he could see in his mind's eye was Maria stepping into some Thorn trap, her face dissolving into drifting black motes as they gunned her down with silver. God, no. If he let Bailey die and Maria's cell number had been erased from the sat phone's memory, there'd be no way to contact her, to call her off from coming to Romania. Maria switched prepaid cell phones so often to avoid FBI tracking and eavesdropping, he didn't have any valid way to call her.

No choices. All risks. Time burning away.

He leaned forward and sank his fangs into Bailey's neck, piercing her skin, biting into her carotid artery. The freshest blood, pumped full of oxygen from the heart, but fouled with poison from Cojocaru's spell. She jerked once, all the major muscles in her body tensing, and then she sagged back down. He drank deeply, feeling the tainted blood fill his stomach. Pain wrenched through him as his body battled against the poison's damage. He fought down the nausea, part of him wondering if this would kill him too, another part of his mind attending his actions with cold interest, with a mental hand on an internal choke chain to yank him back before he drained her completely. The human body held roughly four to five liters of blood, depending on weight, and a hungry vampire could consume all of it. Blood wasn't digested, the way it would be in a living creature. Much of it was burned, for lack of a better term—converted into dark energy to fuel the magic and feed the undead flesh, and the rest was absorbed into a vampire's veins, changed to cold black vampire blood.

His body's healing powers finally gained the upper hand over the spell-taint in her blood, neutralizing the poison. He could hear Bailey's heart beating as he drained her. He couldn't see her face, but her good hand lifted and motioned at the air like the sweep of a conductor before falling back to the floor. Her heartbeat slowed. Slowed. She grew even colder in his arms. He withdrew his fangs from her neck. Her eyes stayed closed, her breathing so soft he could barely detect it.

Quickly, he tilted her head back and opened her mouth. Then the claw of his index finger pushed out, a razor curve against his white wrist. He slashed himself open and held his wrist over her mouth, letting the thin stream of black blood trickle between her lips. She jerked again and tried to turn her face away, spattering black along her cheeks, jaws and throat. He turned her face back, held her mouth open, and she began to swallow.

He felt himself weakening as she continued to drink. Her skin grew paler, and he could smell the difference in her scent as the vampire blood and dark energy began to change her, to fight back the poison in her veins. In his mind, a curious sensation began—a feeling of Bailey's presence, her terrified and exalting flutter of thoughts blurring almost too fast to decipher. The Master-sireling link was complete, and he pulled his arm away. She pushed up weakly, straining after it, but he held her back.

“The number, Bailey,” he whispered. “Hurry. Give me Maria's number.”

Her heartbeats came in staccato bursts now. She gasped in breath. Shuddered. Then she told him the number in a halting whisper, speaking each digit more slowly than the last. But finally he had the complete number and seared it into his memory. He'd sacrificed too much to forget it.

Bailey's heart took one last stuttering beat. She stared into his eyes, and he could see the vampire glow starting deep within. Her bloodstained mouth opened as if to say something. No sound came from her lips. She sighed out a last breath. Her eyes fixed and went blank. Her heart stopped.