Ghost Soldiers (41 page)

Deor's derringers popped off four rounds in rapid order, right before Xiesha let loose with her 12 gauge, hammering him with a solid silver slug. The vampire hunter twisted around at the impact, knocked back into and over the stair railing. His derringers went flying. He hit the ground hard just as the office at the top of the stairs exploded into flames and part of the wall collapsed with a crash and the fire's unrelenting roar.

Cojocaru pulled his hands from behind his back, and they swarmed with dark energy, specks of black motes lifting and swirling from his fingers to his elbows. He stared straight at Karl, his eyes dispassionate, cold, the way they'd eyed one another facing off on the mountain road. Karl opened fire, sending bullet after bullet at Cojocaru's head. The acolyte's shield stopped them all, but the shield was failing.

Bailey cut loose with both shotgun barrels. The shield flashed with bright yellow light and died into spitting bursts of sparks and wisps of flaming vapor. Karl shot at Cojocaru again, just as the sorcerer dropped down and slammed the flat of his palm into the cement. His shot missed, he tracked downward, finger squeezing the trigger—

A wave of shadow, of green-tinged black flames, exploded out from Cojocaru in every direction, jumping up the walls, surging across the cement toward them. The concrete burned, melting away in a powerful shadowfire. The cinderblock walls disintegrated into fiery slag. The acolyte next to Cojocaru incinerated into ash, not even leaving a body behind to burn.

He glimpsed Xiesha as she dropped her shotgun, jumped in front of Bailey and threw both hands out before the surge of black fire swept around her on all sides. He had no more time to think. The black wall of flames came straight for him and Maria. He grabbed her, seeing her startled eyes, smelling her sharp fear, and threw her across the warehouse as hard as he could. She hit with a grunt and slid along the concrete toward the back door. The black flames closed in and seared him.

 

Maria scrambled to her knees. She'd lost the rifle when Karl threw her out of the way of the fire. She opened her mouth to yell something, and Cojocaru's shadowfire swept over Karl. She couldn't even scream. The air she'd drawn in fled her lungs, leaving a void inside.

Karl turned away just as the flames hit. Xiesha, black fire swirling all around her and Bailey in a perfectly defined circle, shouted and threw out a hand. Whatever she did blunted the direct force of the fire and shunted it away from Karl, but his left arm and leg were still caught in the black inferno. Maria screamed his name as he fell. She launched to her feet and ran toward him, pushing into the heat and flames, not caring. She couldn't even remember the last time she'd kissed him, tonight for sure, but the image of it, the memory, wouldn't come to mind. Remembering seemed more important than anything, the thought clanging in her head like a tolling bell. She could only remember hungry fire, red flames, black flames.

The roof groaned one final time and collapsed with an ear-splitting roar and crashing tumult, flaming metal and debris and fire raining down. She slid to a halt as a huge chunk of roof smashed between her and Karl, and then the cinderblock wall collapsed toward her, forcing her to leap away or be crushed.

Fire spread in a wall in front of her, smoke so thick she could barely see. She had to get to Karl. She had to find him. He'd been hurt. Burned. He needed her help. She ran into the black smoke, ignoring the incredible heat, scrambling over wreckage that blistered her skin when she touched it.

Xiesha staggered out of the smoke, dragging Bailey along beside her. Behind her rose a wall of flames ten feet high. She saw Maria and grabbed her too. “We can't go back that way!”

Maria pulled away. “I have to find Karl!” Her eyes burned with tears, her throat seared as if she'd swallowed white-hot wires, her chest crushed as if a pillar of stone had fallen across her.

Xiesha grabbed her again. “We're cut off from him. We must go around the outside!”

“I won't leave him,” Maria yelled over the roar of the fire, trying to break Xiesha's grip. “I won't. Let go! Let me die with him.”

“No!” Xiesha yanked her back from the inferno. More of the roof fell in, flaming ductwork and metal beams crashing and smashing down from the black smoke overhead. “We get out before we get crushed and circle around to find him.”

Maria hesitated one moment more, feeling the incredible heat push against her skin. Her clothes smoked and soon her skin would blister and burn. If it had only been regular fire, she might've pressed on, despite what Xiesha said. But the bright orange-yellow glow of flames was overshadowed in places with the sorcerer's black-green shadowfire, and she knew she had no hope of healing her way through it. So she allowed Xiesha to pull her away. Bailey followed close behind them. Her spirit wolf filled the warehouse with a mournful howl, so much melancholy packed into the wolf song that it twisted in Maria's unbeating heart like a corkscrew.

She sobbed once more, hating the sound and hating herself for making it. Then Xiesha shoved her through the door, and she stumbled into a night transformed, the once-peaceful darkness distorted into an evening in Hell's concert hall, filled with the shimmer of flames and their crackle and roar, the song of sirens, sporadic gunfire and the chop of rotor blades.

The Thorn's black helicopter hovered at the far end of the warehouse, where the sorcerer had been, where the worst of the fire churned, where
Karl
had been. Cutting them off.

“Oh God,” Maria whispered.

 

The black fire burned across Karl's left arm and leg despite Xie's last-second shield. It seared his skin with a pain so splintery-bright and brimming with agony that for a few seconds the world grayed out as he fell. It snapped back into focus almost instantly. He saw Maria running toward him, fear for him in her eyes, and then the roof collapsed. He scrambled back, but a steel beam hit him and knocked him sprawling as more burning debris fell on top of him.

He'd lost his pistol somewhere. Fire swirled all around him. The agony threatened to swallow his mind. Where was Cojocaru? He had to kill Cojocaru. But he was so damn weak. He grunted with pain as he forced himself up, throwing off the rubble pinning him down. He tried to climb to his feet and stumbled and fell. Not enough strength left to stand. Then he'd crawl, damn it.

He saw Erik Deor's boots first, the silver crosses on their tips blazing blue-white stars. He stopped, on his hands and knees, and looked up. Deor stood in the thick haze, hood up, cloak pressed to his mouth, coughing, while above him the smoke twisted and roiled.

White agony. The burns on his arm and leg were unrelenting in their pain. An image of a frozen lake invaded his mind, driving out the sight of Deor and the fire. A frozen lake with the wind tossing snow dust along its surface and dark trees ringing its shores. Black mountains loomed beyond. He shoved the desolate image from his mind and reached for his silver knife. If Deor wanted to kill him, he wouldn't make it easy.

Deor stepped on his forearm before he could pull the blade. Karl looked up and bared his fangs. Deor favored his right side, and part of his body armor had been blown away, down to the partially shattered ceramic plate. Xiesha's shotgun blast. Karl forced his hand toward the knife again. This time Deor kicked him in his burned arm.

Another white expanse of pain. This time, an image of Maria's dark brown eyes suffused his mind, staring at him through the haze of white, with her hair falling all around her face. The image shuttered, flashed to her standing upon the railing, her arms thrown wide, while Boston spread below her. Shuttered. Maria with tears on her face as he kissed her.

He fought through the images, trying to pull himself together, but the pain rose up in a wave and drowned him. Another rapid onslaught of memories drove every thought from his head in the blue-white flare of holy radiance from Deor's symbols.

He stood on a bridge above the Thames, staring into its dark water. The stars wheeled overhead, as if a thousand nights fast-forwarded above him and never reached daylight. His best friend John Avalon, walking next to him down gas-lit streets as they laughed together. Kissing Maria, seeing a smile in her dark eyes. The faces of people he'd killed—blurring past so quickly he could not distinguish them. Xiesha, running through the snow near the frozen lake while Thorn knights with dogs and blades and guns chased her down.

And gone. The images vanished back into the darkness of his mind. Time crashed in once more with all its riot of noise and pain and the unending blaze of hateful light, blue-white, orange and yellow, black and green, all piercing his eyes when he wanted the darkness.

Deor hauled him away from the fire. The agony of his burned limbs dragging across the hot concrete was so great his scream came only as a coughing hiss. He struggled to free himself. The smell of his black vampire blood filled his nostrils, dark soil and roses. He wrenched free and tried to crawl toward Maria, where he'd last seen her.

Deor kicked him over onto his back again. He grunted and rolled, staring up at Deor's implacable, hard-edged face and albino eyes, the thick smoke writhing overhead and filling the warehouse. Karl bared his fangs again. An empty act of defiance, but he did it anyway. Deor held his silver hatchet blade an inch from Karl's throat in silent threat. His purple-blue eyes appeared lusterless and cold above where he covered his mouth with the cloak, both eyes watering from the smoke.

“You can't escape,” he said, and coughed twice.

“Maria…”

Deor grabbed Karl again by his shoulder harness and dragged him toward the bay doors, away from the flames, toward part of the warehouse still intact. “Vampire love disgusts me.”

Karl couldn't answer. His muscles trembled with pain. It was almost impossible to think. Bailey. He had to get a message to Bailey. He fought through his suffering and sent out a thought across his link with her.
“Go. Get Maria and Xiesha out of here. Leave me and go!”

Bailey's thought came back.
“We're coming for you, just hold on—”

“Leave me. Get somewhere safe. I'll meet up… Find you… Tell Maria to trust me again…”
And then the thought-link slipped away into the fog of agony in his mind.

One of the bay doors blew open with a rending explosion. Metal fragments tinged and pinged on the cement and off the walls and columns. Deor flinched and whirled. Karl managed to turn his head enough to see the door.

More fires blazed in the distance. The black silhouettes of soldiers with assault rifles stormed through the hole blasted in the metal, the flashlights on the barrels of their weapons piercing the darkness like white spears. They began to sweep toward Deor, and as they moved, an invisible force pushed out in front of them, smothering the flames and driving away the choking smoke. A woman strode through the middle of the advancing soldiers holding a sword in her hand. She stepped into the firelight, and he recognized Lady MacKenzie.

Karl turned his eyes back to Deor. “Finish it, vampire hunter.”

But Deor said nothing and did not move. The pain in Karl's body hazed his thoughts, clouded his mind and made breathing in to talk a particularly sharp agony.

Thorn knights encircled them, and a half-dozen barrels pointed down into his face. He prayed Maria, Xie and Bailey had safely escaped. He hoped Cojocaru had burned.

Erik Deor smacked the end of his hatchet cane against the floor with a sharp rap and stared at Lady MacKenzie. “This vampire will face Trial.”

MacKenzie stared down at Karl for a long moment. He saw both ferocity and regret in her eyes, but he couldn't have guessed which would hold the day. She turned to her knights. “Bind the vampire. Get him in the chopper. Don't hurt him any more than necessary.” She glanced up at the smoke and the fire dancing just beyond whatever spell force the knights used to drive it back. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

Silvered handcuffs clamped around Karl's arms, but he barely felt the burn. Two knights—a huge man built like a dockworker and a slim black woman—slung their rifles and dragged him between them. Their silver chain mail burned when it brushed him, but he was too weak to cry out.

Maria…

The world grayed out for a time. He heard the deafening pulse of rotor blades, and through his half-closed eyes he saw shifting, angry firelight everywhere, tainting the world red. His thoughts snapped back into focus when they tossed him onto the chopper bed and chained his cuffs to a metal post. He felt so feeble he couldn't have pulled himself free, even had the cuffs not been silver.

He lay on the metal floor next to a body bag. The stench of death and blood and bile filled his nose. Thorn knights clustered all around, bristling with weapons, and many of them stared at him with hatred in their eyes. Two of them worked on a screaming man—the knight wounded by the explosion—and they had blood up to their elbows and smeared across their armor.

Erik Deor climbed in beside Karl and leaned against the metal firewall with his hatchet cane straight across his knees and his gaze far away. Lady MacKenzie tossed her sheathed sword into the helicopter cockpit, climbed into the copilot seat and switched her helmet. She glanced at Karl but said nothing.

The helicopter lifted off in a haze of churning smoke. The pain tightened down again, blurring everything. Words. He could make out words if he concentrated. Someone yelled they were being chased by a police helicopter. A woman—MacKenzie—ordered warning shots, and her voice was followed by machine-gun fire.

He closed his eyes against the world. The last thing he remembered before the darkness snared him was the sound of the ocean. The rotor pulse almost completely drowned it out in a relentless chopping roar, but the crash of waves and hiss of spray remained barely audible if he focused on it, the way he imagined the ebb and flow of the molten heart of the world was white noise to God, a constant muted whisper, but there if He ever tried to listen.