Ghost Soldiers (15 page)

He said nothing. Fury still burned bright in his mind.

She glanced at him and then away again. “I was afraid to die, I'll admit it. Terrified. I felt it coming, and I was so scared. But there was a rope, and I grabbed it. I'm sorry I kept things from you. I'm sorry I…forced this on you. But I won't hate myself because I'm a vampire now. Regretting it would be stupid. I made the choice. I'll deal with it.”

“You do what I say from now on,” he said. “You belong to me now. In every God-cursed way. And you don't even know what that means yet.”

He walked over to the moldering cardboard box against the wall. Blue-white light began to flare behind it. He kicked the box and it tumbled across the room, spilling rat-chewed papers. Bailey's silver cross flared into brighter blue-white radiance. Bailey gasped in pain, bared her fangs and threw up her hands against the shining light. A groan escaped her lips and a shudder wracked her body. He stood absolutely still, enduring the agony, the burn of the light against his skin, the holy aura like an invisible wall between him and the crucifix, allowing him no closer.

“
Listen
to me,” he said. “You're done with that life. You chose something else.”

She rubbed a hand across her lips and then ran her hand into her blue hair and clutched it there as she stared at the floor, pain and terror and revulsion swirling across their shared link. Tufts of blue poked out between her fingers, and her eyes glowed red. “You're right. I'm done with that. Everything's different, and I accept that. I do. I
accept
that.”

He turned away from her, walked to the half-destroyed box and threw it back over the crucifix before retreating. The glow diminished as he withdrew, though he could still sense its malevolent purity hidden beneath the cardboard. “That's your first lesson. Never forget it.”

“You still think we're evil because holy symbols repel us? Because silver and holy things hurt us?”

He didn't answer.

She frowned at him, her face suddenly fierce. “Is that what you think? Because nothing could be farther from the truth.” She waved a hand at the box. “Those things just channel the power of the True, the force of every positive thought, feeling or noble impulse from every sentient creature in all possible worlds. It's not sentient itself—not…
malicious
. It doesn't judge us. It's just a force, like gravity or electricity or…” she tried a smile and ended up only looking sickly, “…or bad daytime television. Something's only evil because of what it
does
, not because of what it
is
.”

“Don't try to feed me shallow philosophies. Once I could hold a cross. Now just looking at one causes me pain.”

“So what? If your hands were made out of…I don't know, Neoprene or whatever, then you could handle acid without having it eat your skin. Or if you were rubber, you could hold onto a power line and not die.”

“Gibberish. Meaningless examples.”

“Like hell. Those symbols of the Holy, of the Sanctified and True, yeah, they hurt us now. They didn't hurt us before as…humans, but we
changed
. This form is hurt by that kind of energy. It's just a vulnerability, like cancer or whatever. Jesus Christ. It doesn't mean we're monsters.”

“You have the confidence of a true believer.” His words seethed with bitterness.

She lifted her chin and stared him in the eye. “I prefer the word faith. But yeah, I do. It's the faith which powers the magic—the faith of every religion and no religion, shit, every time an atheist helps an old lady across the street—that goodwill, good karma in the universe, can be channeled. Those symbols are unthinking, nonjudgmental floodgates for it.”

Karl shoved his hands in his pockets so she would not see them tremble and concentrated on keeping his turmoil from seeping through their link. He leaned toward her and spoke very softly. “When you've drained your first human until they die—when you've done that, come back and tell me again how we're not monsters.”

He walked out of the room, letting the door fall shut behind him.

Outside, the night felt cool against his skin. A thousand stars shone in the sky. The old refinery was dark and silent, the abandoned buildings brooding over wreckage and rust and mildew. He stared off to the north, the way they'd fled from the mountains.

Too many thoughts collided inside his mind, smashing against one another, breaking into barely coherent pieces. He swept them all aside in disgust. It was long past time to leave. According to Bailey, the team sent by the Thorn would be in Romania by now, headed here to clean up the mess. He cast his vampire senses outward, sweeping through the night and felt something—a brush of intent, the faintest tremble of focused malice. Something was out there, hunting for them, making his senses vibrate like a cat's whisker trailing along a metal wall.

A dark shape cut across the sky, blotting out stars at it flew toward him. He drew into the deeper shadows as the shape wheeled over the abandoned refinery, moving fast and low. Cojocaru's succubus had found them.

She sailed a hundred feet above the wreckage of the gate and the overturned truck. This close, he felt the pulse of her magic, her sexual lure radiating out from her like waves of heat, trying to cloud his mind with lust. Her power worked best on humans, and he shunted its effects aside with minimal effort. She circled overhead, her dark smoke wings whooshing and snapping like the main sails on a galleon. The sniper rifle was damaged and useless, and he had no other weapon that could reach her. Damn it.

She turned in a wide arc, staring down at the refinery. Then she swerved away and raced northeast, her dark wings beating furiously as she gained altitude. He knew she hadn't seen him hiding here, but it didn't matter. The truck alone would be enough to put Cojocaru back on their trail.

He slipped back inside. Bailey sat against the wall, staring at her hand as she pushed her retractable claws in and out of her fingertips. She glanced up at him, and he felt her unease through their link, and beneath it, a vast black pool of fear. She was far less confident than her words implied.

“We've been spotted,” he said. “We're going. Right now.”

“To the Thorn? I still have friends. People who can help us. Protect us from Lord Sokoll.”

To hell with the Thorn and with Cojocaru and all the betrayals and manipulations and threats. If they wanted war, he'd give it to them in spades. “No. No more Thorn. Ever. I'm going back to Boston.”

A look of dismay crossed her face. “But my friends…”

He only stared at her and said nothing, which seemed to unnerve her more than any words.

“Will you take me too?” she asked. “With you to Boston?”

He wanted to say no, wanted to let her burn in the coals she'd stoked. But what would that make him? She was his sireling now, in some ways almost the same as a child. She was his responsibility, like it or not.

“Yes,” he finally answered, picking up her long sword in his burned hand and ignoring the pain.

For the first time since he'd found the dead woman in the car by the side of the mountain road, he felt almost alive with a grim hope. He was done suffering for others, done being a weapon. He was heading back to Boston. Back to Maria. And God help anyone who got in his way.

Chapter Sixteen: Dreams

Maria lay in the darkness, held in vampire sleep inside a room sealed from every stray beam of light as the sun burned in the deep blue of a New England sky. At first there were only images flashing out of the empty blackness of her mind. Explosions of light and sound and movement, disappearing into nothingness in an instant, but they came faster and faster.

Images. Maria's mother, dressed in her Sunday best, holding a white purse over her arm as she walked beneath the oaks, the shadows of the tree leaves dappling her face. Maria ran to her, fallen leaves crunching beneath her feet, but as she drew near, her mother's face blurred and streaked like wet paint in a downpour. Her eyes though, those brown haunted eyes, watched Maria without blinking.

Back to darkness. Flickering images, rapid as film though a reel projector.

A bedroom. Her brother Paul leaned against the doorframe, watching her as she put in earrings and ran lipstick across her lips. She wore a bright red dress—one she remembered from high school…a dance. Paul watched her with half-amused, half-ferocious intensity—a mountain lion staring from a tree branch overhead. When she'd called him on it, cutting him with words, he'd only said one sentence in reply, but the coldness at the heart of it had emptied her of joy.

“Your date better know who you are.”

He pushed off the frame, turned and walked away, vanishing down the hall into shadow. Part of her wanted to call out to him, to touch him again, to tell him all the horrible things that had happened since he'd died. Part of her wanted that. But the rest of her kept still—very still—and did not dare follow him down the hall, into the black.

Flicker again. Darkness. Light. The focus grew clearer. Her father carrying her through the fairgrounds. His strong arms holding her as he strode across the patches of trampled grass, avoiding the mud and the trash. Flies buzzed. The Ferris wheel towered above her. Oh how she'd loved to ride the Ferris wheel as a kid. When you swung up so high it felt as if you owned the world—could reach out your hands and touch the land all the way to the blue horizon. And the clouds overhead, a white so bright it belonged to angels. The breeze soft in her face, cooling her from the sun and the heat baking the poor people trapped down below. Daddy had gone with her every time she'd asked.

Darkness. Flicker. More images, this time of the sun drowning in a sky of blood, sinking quickly beneath the horizon. A bead of water forming at the end of an icicle, growing heavy there, and then falling to the melting snow.

Delgado sitting in a chair, one hand cupping a wineglass filled with blood. Delgado smiling. Beckoning her with his eyes. And God help her, she went to him because she couldn't stop…but behind her back she gripped a knife.

Flicker.

Frost forming crystalline patterns upon window glass. Fractal lattices in rapid birth. Ice flowers. Frost-feathered branches.

Flicker.

Once more the sun high in the sky, stabbing down with daggers of intense yellow light, so blessedly warm on her skin. Around her stretched a desert as white as bone, filled with leaning, hollowed-out saguaro, dead spindly ocotillo rattling with the hot breeze. The sun—she couldn't stop staring at it—not even stopping to wonder why her vampire flesh wasn't incinerated. Why should she wonder? This was
before
. Before vampires had entered her life and things had gone from out of the blue into the blackest black.

Darkness swallowed everything again, the sun suddenly gone, and for an instant it felt as if her still heart might burn away to smoke. Then another image slammed into her mind's eye, driving out any thought of sorrow.

Karl stood in the middle of her empty warehouse, staring at her with eyes glowing red, while above him the ceiling writhed and danced with flames and roiling smoke. A woman stood a step behind him. Her hair was blue, she wore a long white coat missing a sleeve, and her pupils glowed a bloody vampire red. Between Karl and the woman a blue electric arc snaked and crackled in the air from his body to hers. Maria reached out a hand, not knowing if she meant to touch Karl or the strange energy between him and the other vampire. No clear thoughts would form in her mind, but an overwhelming sense of terror and loss crashed through her, sucking the air out of her lungs and the words from her mouth.

The fire overhead burned faster, but cast no light. Shadows gathered around them, shifting and twisting, seeming far too solid for darkness, as if the black had found the will to drown them all. The shadows started to close in, cutting off escape. Overhead, the fire guttered and died. A curtain of black descended, and the only things that shone within it were red vampire eyes, staring at her.

Chapter Seventeen: Ghost Soldiers

Destroying her cell phone after talking to Karl had hurt the way Maria imagined sawing off a gangrenous limb hurt, with the same mix of desperation and loss, pain and bitter regret, because she fully knew without the cell she couldn't talk to him again until he made it back to Boston.

If
he made it back to Boston.

No. Down that road of thought lay madness. Still, the nights of silence since she'd last talked to him seemed to stretch forever. Even Xiesha was worried, and though she said nothing, Maria could tell. She'd left Xiesha behind to try scrying for Karl again.

She'd promised him she wouldn't go to Romania. She'd promised to wait. And she
would
wait, despite her horrible dreams, especially the one about Karl and the blue-haired vampire. She'd wait in Boston and try to keep everything she'd built from falling apart. But if she found Cojocaru's pet Nassid again, the goddamn thing was as good as dead. She didn't know what she'd do if she ran across Lady MacKenzie, but it probably wouldn't be pretty. So no matter how often her thoughts strayed to Karl, there was work to do. Money to make and knees to break.

She parked her Benz in a neighborhood two blocks away from the George Wright Golf Course in Hyde Park, set the alarm and started to walk. She hated to leave her car so far away from where she'd be the next few hours. It'd certainly be a bitch if it ended up stolen. She couldn't exactly file a police report, now could she?

She'd called for an emergency meeting with all her skippers at the home of Davey Abello. She planned to declare an end to the war, open up the books for Ricardi associates who'd proved themselves, all the while evaluating the loyalty and discontent in her family. A boss had to be insulated from the day-to-day minutia of the crime
borgata
in order to protect him from indictments, but that could lead to turmoil within a family as well. Maria needed to be seen. She needed her people to pay their respects. It wasn't an ego thing, but a strategic move. When she'd been younger and stupider and alive it'd been something she'd always dreamed of, but now, with Karl gone and so many threats loose, she couldn't find the heart to revel in it.