Ghost Soldiers (4 page)

“Killing makes me trustworthy?”

“Killing for us does. You're out here on the front line with me, and if Sokoll thinks we're expendable…” She shook her head. “You and me, we gotta do what we gotta do to pull this off. Cojocaru's planning a major spell-working in two nights. Some kind of powerful magic, something to do with a vampire prisoner.” She gave Karl a significant glance. “The infiltrator gave me a GPS location and a time, but he didn't check in again when he should've, and we lost all contact shortly after.”

“Pack it up. We're getting out of here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The mission's burned. Your guy's dead; that means we've all been made.”

“No way. This took months to put together. Just because I told you a secret doesn't mean I'm ready to bag the mission. We check out the last place the Watchers tagged him and go from there. If Sorin Cojocaru shows his face…” she pointed at the Barrett sniper rifle, forming her hand into a pistol and closing one eye as if aiming, “…then you introduce him to your little friend. Simple as that.”

But of course he knew it would never be as simple as that.

 

Bailey killed the diesel engine, and the surrounding slopes and trees settled into an expectant hush. She'd raced here fast enough, pushing the converted ice cream truck to speeds that made the frame shudder and groan and the entire truck feel as if it would tip over on the curves. Karl pushed open the truck's back doors and stepped down off the bumper onto the ground with the sniper rifle in his hands. Unease sank its teeth in even deeper.

He scanned into the night with his vampire senses. Nothing but thick stands of trees and the half-circle clearing of a turnout. High mountain slopes, rocky crags, cliffs and peaks. The two-lane road behind them sat deserted. The cool air smelled of evergreens, tainted by a whiff of diesel fumes. Then the breeze changed and he smelled blood.

He shut the door behind him and advanced along the side of the truck in a combat crouch with the Barrett up at his shoulder. He slipped into the darkness of the tree line. Light—a faint flicker of amber—drew his attention across the stand of pines to something on the other side. He knelt near a fallen trunk and lifted the sniper rifle, staring at the scene farther down the road through the high-powered scope.

“I have visual through the crosshairs on the monitor,” Bailey confirmed over the com.

He sighted in on two vehicles parked a few hundred meters away, where the road curved past a thick mass of evergreens. An RV had stopped on the dirt shoulder, and its hazard lights threw pulses of gold across the asphalt and into the trees. It leaned drunkenly to one side as noxious black and gray smoke drifted from its frame and blew into the tree line. A man's body lay near the RV's metal steps, sprawled in the carpet of pine needles. The scope's magnification brought his shredded flesh into sharp focus. On the other side of the road, a tractor trailer had careened into a tree, smashing the cab and jackknifing across both lanes.

He kept his voice a breath above a whisper as he spoke into the mike. “You getting this?”

“Affirmative,” Bailey answered, but her voice seemed dazed, muted. “Civilian casualties. Any sign of hostiles?”

He sent his vampire senses sweeping farther outward. No strange sounds, but he caught a chaotic mix of scents—blood, wolves, decay, the metallic stink of fear and other things too intertwined to isolate—and he sensed the lingering echo of magic. “Nothing. I'm heading in.”

“Keep frosty. This is some bad shit…”

He stalked through the trees, cutting a direct line away from the curving road. He placed each foot carefully, setting the outside of his boot to the ground first, then rolling the rest of his foot slowly down to avoid snapping twigs, and he watched for branches that might snag on his clothes or the rifle.

The smell of blood intensified as he crept closer. Everything lay silent, except for the ticking of an engine as it cooled and a steady drip and splatter of fluids onto the road. He headed toward the RV. No movement. Nothing alive. The night held all its cards face down, and silence ran the game.

He stepped out of the tree line onto the dirt shoulder, approaching the RV at an angle. Gaping holes riddled the entire side of the RV, and though he saw no flames, smoke poured off the edges of the holes as if some kind of acid ate away at the metal. The rear tire had dissolved off the rim, leaving tendrils and patches of melted rubber on the metal and asphalt. The reek of the smoke made his eyes burn, and he hurried out of the cloud, thankful he didn't have to breathe.

The dead man near the RV's steps had been ripped open, his chest nothing more than a gaping hole. A caul of blood hid most of his face, down to the heavy lines around his mouth and the sagging skin around his chin. More droplets of blood speckled his gray hair. Karl knelt near him, cradling the long rifle as he scented the wounds.

Werewolves. No mistake.

More than one, judging from the tangled scents and the range in length and width of the bite wounds and claw marks. Most wolf packs had firm laws against hunting humans nowadays, generally punishable by death. A complete opposite of vampires, who preyed on humans almost exclusively. He'd had dealings with the Blackstone wolves in Boston, and he couldn't imagine them savaging a man like this. Hell, Karl had killed a werewolf for the Thorn once, a long time ago, but it had been a rogue wolf, half-insane with grief and loss, rage and pain. A mercy killing.

But they'd shown no mercy here. They'd ripped the man apart like frenzied, mindless animals.

He stood and opened the door to the RV, making no sound as he climbed the steps. The thick reek of blood ambushed him, smothering in its crimson strength. Blood painted the walls in tacky splashes. More scrambled scents were all intermixed and difficult to isolate, but through the mess he caught something foul, the corrupt reek of something much uglier than rogue wolves.

Ghouls. Flesh eaters. He searched the RV, again wishing he had his SIG 9mm or one of Xie's shotguns for clearing enclosed spaces. The sniper rifle was cumbersome and near useless in close quarters.

He found what was left of an old woman's body in the tiny bathroom inside the shower stall. Her body had been flayed, gnawed, her limbs and torso devoured of all fat and muscle and organs. Bailey moaned over the headset—a helpless sound of horror. He turned away.

Ghouls? Rogue wolves? What the hell was going on? Karl left the RV and headed for the tractor trailer. It had plowed off the road and slammed into a tree, shattering the tree trunk and smashing the cab. The driver's door hung partially open. He approached cautiously, rifle up and ready. Still no sounds from the surrounding forest. No insects. No night creatures scurrying through the underbrush.

The truck driver's severed head had rolled against one of the rig's wheels, his green hat still pulled down low on his head. His body hung half in, half out of the truck cab, sprays of tacky blood staining the weeds and dirt, and more blood puddled beneath his body. The air stank of antifreeze, engine oil and diesel. Blood, of course. Metal. Terror.

No ghouls though, and his body hadn't been eaten. Why not? Why leave a free meal? Nothing here made sense.

The tractor cab had been scorched and riven in places, and the upper side looked as if it had been attacked by the Jaws of Life. The sensation of magic lingered, seeming to sublimate off the metal, reminding him of the place where the vampire had been captured after killing the woman in the Yugo.

“Looks like spell damage,” Bailey said over the com. “Magicslingers.”

Karl stepped away from the truck and saw the last corpse.

The man had been lashed naked to a road sign warning of the sharp curve ahead. The wire bound him to the sign so tightly it cut into his bare skin and neck. His head lolled to the side, and where the dead woman in the Yugo had looked to the trees, this man's empty gaze fixed on a jagged mountain peak.

“Oh God…” Bailey whispered as Karl stalked closer, centering the headset camera on the dead man's face. “Oh shit…”

He was young, probably no more than twenty-five. Cuts and bruises marred his face, and a chunk of his lip dangled from his mouth like a shred of hamburger. One eye was bruised purple and swollen shut. His tongue hung from between his slack lips, and it had turned completely black. More bruises and cuts covered the rest of his body, and thin black lines spider-webbed beneath his skin as if all the blood in his veins had been replaced with ink. Around his neck he wore a strange golden collar with a cat's-eye jewel in the center. A crack had split the jewel in half.

“Karl, it's Vali.” Bailey's voice hovered between a whisper and a sob. “Vali Petrescu, our infiltrator.
Shit
.”

Shit
was an understatement. “Do you want me to cut him down?”

He couldn't sense any lingering magic that might indicate a booby trap, but the man's body still thrummed with malignant energy from the spell that had killed him. Touching him might be risky, and he didn't have any wire cutters.

There was silence over the com—too much silence, not even the gentle sound of Bailey's breathing, so she must have cut the connection and muted the channel. Was she calling her commander and saying things she didn't want him to hear?

Karl faded back into the shadows of the tree line and paused before plunging into the deeper darkness. He dropped to one knee, still cradling the rifle, and offered a brief prayer for the four souls. He hadn't killed these people, and God had stopped listening to him long ago. But there was no one else to do it, and they deserved at least a prayer.

Headlights appeared in the far distance. A car, heading toward the scene of carnage.

The headset speaker clicked in his ear and Bailey came on again. “Get back here. No time to clean up. We have orders to leave everything. And
hurry
.”

He stood and sprinted through the trees back toward their truck, taking a small measure of relief at the emptiness of the surrounding mountain slopes. At least the poor bastard who stumbled on this mess wouldn't be killed for stopping.

He climbed into the back of the truck, and Bailey took off before he got the door shut.

“We need to abort.” He set the rifle down and moved toward the cab. “Leaving your man bound like that was a warning—Cojocaru knows we're here. The mission is shot.”

Bailey didn't acknowledge him for several moments. “Negative. I just received orders to proceed as planned.”

He almost stumbled. “What? That's insane.”

“This is our one chance, Karl. Vali didn't know anything about the specifics of this op or the type of threat we bring. Lord Sokoll still considers this mission fully viable.” She hesitated, her breathing quick and sharp. “Besides, Thorn knights never talk.”

Karl could hear the lie quite clearly in her voice.

Chapter Five: Home Front

The sky over Boston Harbor glittered with stars. A stiff breeze blew off the water, carrying the smells of brine and low tide, the distant clang of buoy bells and the lap of waves against pilings and hulls. To the south, past the dry dock and across a channel of dark water, the huge cranes and buildings of the Massport Conley Terminal cargo port were lit up like a sports arena.

Maria crawled headfirst down the side of the warehouse from the roof, keeping to the shadowed side of the building away from the harbor lights. When she got low enough, she flipped and landed neatly on the diamond plate of the fire escape with her boots making only the slightest thrum on the metal. Every night she grew a little faster, a little better at controlling her vampire reflexes and powers. Even with only Xiesha—who wasn't a vampire—as a mentor, she was improving.

Still, Xiesha was a poor substitute for Karl.

Maria knocked lightly on the steel door. A moment later it swung open, and Xiesha stood at the threshold in her brown and orange kimono, a shotgun in her hands, a pen clenched between her teeth and a Sudoku book tucked under one arm.

“Working hard?” Maria smiled and jerked her chin at the puzzle book.

“Extremely. These puzzles are addicting as sin.” She stepped back to let Maria enter their makeshift warehouse slash hideout slash base of operations.

As usual, Maria couldn't sense her. She had no heartbeat, no scent. Her skin actually shimmered a bit in low light, as if she glowed softly with some strange, alien energy. Today, she had her brown hair done up in a bun with red lacquered chopsticks to match her kimono. Xiesha was all about Japan, even though she wasn't Japanese.

The hairs on the back of Maria's arms stood up as she stepped over the threshold and crossed Xiesha's wards—faint, purple-black shimmers she always thought resembled cascading chains of light. Sort of an otherworldly hippie-bead curtain. The wards acted as alarms and kept them concealed from the Thorn—and anything else that might be hunting them.

Xiesha pulled the door shut behind Maria, and it latched with a loud click. “How did your meeting go?”

“It seemed like a good idea making Grimaldi my
consigliere.
His crew is earning, and he revels in the role.” She shrugged. “The old man does know a bit about the traditions of the Honored Society, but he doesn't do much to hide the fact he sees my presence as a borderline insult.”

“Did he tell you anything useful? What will New York do about a woman running the Ricardi family?”

Maria pushed her dark hair from her face and walked across the catwalk over the warehouse floor toward the offices they'd converted into makeshift living quarters. “Grimaldi confirmed everything I'd suspected. New York is unhappy. The other skippers are unhappy. Ricardi soldiers are unhappy. Everybody's fucking unhappy.”

The warehouse often struck her as vaguely menacing. Always dark, since neither of them needed much light to see. It smelled of cement flooring, mildew, arc welding fumes, gunpowder and metal, and very faintly of old cardboard. The bay doors rattled from time to time when the wind pushed against them—a sound that startled her no matter how many times it happened. A forklift frame sat gutted by one of the cement ramps. The mezzanine was empty save for deep shadows and a pile of moldering cardboard boxes, while the vast expanse of cement floor was decorated with brightly colored hazard tape and spray-painted lettering.