Ghost Soldiers (2 page)

“Oh, the beautiful irony,” Maria said softly. “But it's too late.”

Frank sobbed. The fear stink coming off him seemed to wrap him in a cloud. She could smell the blood that had splashed her face when she'd killed the bodyguard, and both scents made her fangs ache. He flailed at her, scratching and clawing and slapping, but she pulled him forward effortlessly, all two hundred fifty plus pounds of him.

He grunted one last time when she drove her fangs into his throat and began to feed.

 

She left Frank's pale corpse sitting slumped against the wall at the top of the stairs, beneath the water stain on the plaster, a grim present for the cops. The sirens had gone silent just moments ago, but doors started slamming outside, police radios squawked and chattered, and the lights from the cruisers turned the stairwell into a flickering kaleidoscope of red and blue.

She walked back into Frank's office, making no sound, her body seeming to vibrate with power now that she'd fed. Her mind flooded with sensations, as if she were thrown open to the world without blinders, shades or screens to diminish the intensity of life to a sane level. Odd, since she wasn't even alive. Still, she noticed how the brown carpet had threads of green woven in, and looked shabbily iridescent, like the shell of some vagabond beetle. Blood, the ever-present scent of it, but also urine and spent gunpowder, so cloying it nearly choked her. The inner office was the worst. She paused and looked at what she'd done.

Eddie lay crumpled in the corner atop the crushed palm. His empty pupils stared up and to the side, peering at the paneling in wide-eyed horror. The mustached bodyguard sprawled unmoving on the carpet as the red bloodstain spread beneath his body. His revolver lay off to the side, its nickel plating marred with fingerprints and a single teardrop splash of red on the cylinder.

Maria looked away. She left the shotgun—it couldn't be traced, and it seemed to gloat at her over the slaughter from its vantage point on the desk. Its twin barrels watched her like eyes, cruel and knowing.

Far below her, footsteps pounded up the stairs. She slipped out the way she'd come in, through the window at the back of the narrow, square office, and scaled directly up the scarred brick wall. The day's heat still lingered in the bricks. The sensation made her linger despite the danger. She pressed her palms, and then her face, flat against the rough surface, remembering the feeling of sunlight on her skin. At last, she began to climb again, very aware of the dark energy pulse swirling around her, allowing her to defy the pull of gravity as she touched the rough brick and clambered onto the roof. The night sky stretched above her, strewn with clouds, and cold.

Four police cruisers had blockaded the street in front of the building. She doubted any of the cops would shed a tear for poor old Frank. The coroner might weep, though, in sorrow for his lower back, hauling the fat corpse around. She'd meant the thought to be funny, flippant, but it only made her stomach feel as if Frank had managed to pierce it with his ice pick.

She moved soundlessly to the power line connected to the corner of the building and stepped out onto the wire. Her body felt charged, strong, a battery humming with energy as she ran across the wire to the corner of the building across the street. The night brimmed with a thousand scents, a thousand sounds and sights all competing for her attention. It was always that way just after she'd fed.

She hated it almost as much as she loved it.

She stopped three buildings farther down the street and crouched on a roof ledge above a gutter to watch the commotion from the darkness. Safer to leave.
Wiser
to leave, but she felt as if she owed it somehow to the men she'd killed to look on for a while. To remember it. They'd been monsters, sure, but they'd finally met a real monster, and maybe they deserved some pity for that at least.

A crowd gathered and cars slowed as more sirens shrieked in and an ambulance arrived. One cop pushed out of the building's front door and stood there leaning against a cruiser, his head down, staring at the cracked asphalt.

She'd done that. She'd done the things that made the cop's heart hammer away and left him all but gasping for breath. Her hand came up and wiped at the blood on her lips and cheeks. She felt strangely hollow, as if her pale skin was only eggshell over emptiness. She turned and walked away, her steps silent on the roofing.

She had won. Boston was hers.

Chapter Two: Business Not Pleasure

Karl Vance flipped the clasps on the black plastic case and lifted the lid. Inside, the pieces of a disassembled M82A1 Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle sat on ridged foam. Even unassembled, the thing had a raw and deadly look. Not a pretty weapon by any stretch, but the rifle was his ticket home. Back to Boston. Back to Maria.

He only had to kill someone with it first.

Slowly he removed the pieces of the rifle from the case and began to assemble it on top of the defunct chest freezer where he slept during the day. He loat
hed the freezer. It reeked inside of old ice and mildew, but he endured it, since his sole transportation in Romania consisted of a battered ice cream truck from what looked like the Nicolae Ceauşescu years, repainted a sickly industrial gray. He could fee
l the diesel engine's rumble through his boots as the truck roared along the road, rocking from time to time on the curves. He'd been told the engine was new, and the modified truck's profile resembled a SWAT team van with its heavy frame and metal siding. The damn freezer, though. He frowned. Since both the truck and the sniper rifle had been supplied by the Order of the Thorn, he had little choice in the matter.

Karl removed the rifle's upper receiver from the case and slid out the barrel, trying not to brood over the job, trying instead to lose himself in the motions of assembly he'd mastered over the past months. He'd trained with his handler, a chit of a Thorn knight named Bailey Fletcher, in the mountains of Serbia, north of the town of Bor—not near Sarajevo as he'd been first told by the Thorn. Just another in a long list of changes, secrets and misinformation.

He could hear Bailey talking to someone from the front of the cab on her satellite phone, likely something classified, but she had to almost yell to be heard over the engine, and Karl had better-than-human hearing.

“You broke cover for that?” A long pause. “You sure it's relevant?” The truck leaned to the left as it hugged a sharp turn on the mountain road. “Roger that, we'll check it out. Over.”

He returned his attention to the rifle. Bipod legs down on the lower receiver. Grab the cocking handle, remove the mid lock pin, slide the bolt forward. Set the upper receiver on the lower, insert lock pins. Easy, practiced motions, and he almost avoided thinking of Maria and Xiesha alone in Boston without him.

Instead he turned his thoughts to the man he'd been sent to kill—a sorcerer named Sorin Cojocaru. Since he didn't have clearance from the Thorn to know what crime had earned the sorcerer a death mark, it was better to focus on losing himself in the simple Zen of rifle assembly. A rifle never worried if it was about to be used for murder.

He attached the scope and set the completed sniper rifle down on the freezer top. There wasn't much unused space in the back of the converted ice cream truck. All the sinks, refrigeration motors, pipes and counters had been ripped out, the serving window boarded up with a wide piece of plywood screwed into the metal siding, and only the chest freezer remained of the truck's original guts, sitting flush against one side and fitted over the wheel well. The rest of the space was filled with a vast array of high-tech electronic equipment and batteries, the air redolent with the stink of ozone. A computer station dominated the opposite wall, with Bailey's swivel chair mounted to the floor, surrounded by flat-screen monitors and a slew of gadgetry.

The door separating the cab and the back slid open. “Karl, we got an errand to run.”

He left the rifle on its bipod and climbed through into the cab's passenger seat. The view through the windshield made him pause and stare. Snow lingered on the highest slopes of the Bucegi Mountains. The cliffs held dark swaths of trees, wind-carved ledges, while peaks and ridges cut stark silhouettes against the star field. He'd called the city home for so long, he'd forgotten the dark, brooding majesty of places where humanity had a tenuous hold at best. He drew in breath by reflex, thinking he'd smell the cold and the trees, but got instead the stink of artificial pine air freshener and human sweat. He could smell Bailey Fletcher's blood as well, streaming through her veins, warm and very close.

He glanced at her. Bailey might be a Thorn knight, his handler, and the controller responsible for this mission, but she looked all of twenty-two, maybe twenty-three years old…and a very young twenty-three at that. Her skin shone pale in the dashboard lights—too little sun of late, working with a vampire. Her hair bristled stubble-short on the sides and stood spiked on top, dyed the vibrant blue of a child's wading pool. A scattershot of piercings riddled her ears. She owned the standard, Thorn-issue, chain mail hauberk of silver-plated steel—it was propped in the back by her workstation with her long sword—but she never wore it, strangely enough. Instead she wore only her long white greatcoat over a black Misfits T-shirt and threadbare jeans. A child, giving him orders.

“How's your energy?” Bailey asked as she turned the wide steering wheel. “You hungry, or can you do this without feeding again?”

No fear from her at the prospect of sharing space with a hungry vampire. Strange. Strange or stupid, perhaps both. He'd hunted and fed on a man in Craiova, near the river, less than a week ago. Bailey had told him the man was wanted by the authorities for murdering his landlord with a splitting maul. Karl had wanted to believe her—had no other choice but to believe her—so he asked no questions and prayed for the man's soul afterward.

“Let's just get this over with.” The sooner this was done, the sooner he could collect payment from the Thorn for his services as assassin. Amnesty for Maria and his daylight guardian Xiesha. One death to purchase freedom from the Order's executioners. The mission had seemed like such a small thing at the time, because he'd killed so many. What was one more? In the end, it almost didn't matter what the man had done, or why the Order wanted him dead.

Bailey waved a gloved hand at the satellite phone sitting on the dashboard. “I just got a call saying some real bad shit went down about fifteen klicks away. We're on our way to check it out.”

“Your spy?”

“Infiltrator. They get super pissed if you call them spies. But yeah, he broke deep cover off schedule to relay the message, so whatever it is, it's bad.”

He said nothing for a long moment, thinking about the sniper rifle sitting on the freezer. “Will our target be there?”

The glance she gave him was grim. “I guess we'll find out real quick.”

 

A red Yugo sedan sat on the shoulder of the winding, two-lane mountain road. The passenger door gaped open. Karl reached in and gently turned the woman's head to the side. She had to be in her mid-twenties. Her brown eyes stared unblinking at the shadows in the trees. Fang punctures in her throat. Her skin shone almost translucent with the pallor of death.

“Shit…” Bailey's word wheezed over the headset earpiece, sounding as if she'd been punched in the stomach. She had two views of the scene, the first via a small camera on his headset feeding images to her computer monitors, and the second from a high-tech camera showing her images through the crosshairs of his riflescope. Both were broadcast to the truck safely parked half a mile up the road. “
Shit
.”

A vampire. The smell of it lingered around the dead woman's body—a reek of cinnamon, a predator musk and death. He reached out and gently closed her eyes. Her skin still held some warmth beneath his fingertips. He whispered a quiet prayer for her, for all the good it would do now.

He stood, shifted the rifle and moved around the car. Broken plastic crunched under his boots. The right side of the Yugo's front end had crumpled from an impact. Long stripes of rubber scarred the road behind the car. A nasty gash marred a tree trunk, stark white in the darkness. The vampire had probably caused her to swerve, and she'd clipped the tree, spun the car around. Then the vampire had closed in and fed. He'd seen the setup before. He touched the curve of the Barrett's trigger as he allowed himself to imagine putting one of the silver-jacketed, spell-modified rounds through the vampire's forehead.

His earpiece filled with the rapid
clack, clack, clack
of Bailey's fingers stabbing the keyboard back in the truck. “I'm relaying this to Command. Any sign of hostiles?”

He scanned the trees again, searching with his vampire senses for any cold, black pulse of vampire presence. He sensed nothing, but the vampire might've been shielding well enough to mask himself. “Negative on hostiles.”

He edged along the shoulder, examining the dirt near the trees. The scent of the vampire grew confused a few feet from the car. It became muddled and mixed with other smells: a sour, sulfurous reek, an acrid chemical odor. And…

He sensed the fading thrum of magic, energy summoned and burned to fuel a spell sculpture.

Shallow gouges and the half-circle marks of pivoting feet marred the hard-packed dirt on the side of the road. A splash of pustulant yellowish liquid painted the dirt near the edge of the trees and spattered across the undergrowth. Not vampire blood, which burned off quickly once spilled. Strange.

The lingering echo of drawn magic was strongest here. He paced in a widening circle, trying to find its center, and something caught his eye. Several six-inch-long needles stuck out of the dirt. He pulled one free and held it up. His fingertip and thumb tingled with a warm, pleasurable sensation—a lover's kiss on soft skin. After a few seconds, the needle softened and collapsed into a silver strand of hair.