Ghost Soldiers (16 page)

She'd ordered all the usual precautions. No discussion over phone lines or cells. No discussion with soldiers or associates. Switch cars, run red lights, random turns to lose possible tails. She wore black, the vampire color du jour and utilitarian night-crawling hue: black jeans, black long sleeves and black boots—not heels of course, something sensible with treads and grip.

After long deliberation, she'd left her Glock behind in the Benz because bringing a gun to a meeting was strictly forbidden. Going without the silver-loaded semi-auto made her uneasy, especially after everything that had happened, but only her people knew about this meeting and she'd made sure neither the Thorn nor anything loyal to Cojocaru had tailed her. Her feet made no echo as she walked on the pavement, past a three-decker and then a tiny rundown Colonial Revival Cape Cod with a half-dead lawn. Davey Abello's house had alley access to his back door, which they'd all agreed to use to avoid attracting attention.

The reek of garbage intensified as she moved toward the alley entrance—something left rotting, eggs or maybe meat. Disgusting. The powerful stink blanketed everything, making it difficult to scent anything else. She turned the corner into the alley, now walking on cobblestones, with a brick tenement building rising up on her left, on her right a weather-worn fence with peeling red paint. Beyond it opened a weed-choked backyard with no wall. The stink of garbage grew stronger, smothering every other scent in rot and spoilage.

Breathing—the sound of fast breathing, more than one person. Heartbeats. Four heartbeats, all of them rapid, but one pounding fast and frantic. The hairs on her arm lifted…something was wrong—

Gun oil. She finally singled it out over the stench of rotting meat. Gun oil and warm blood. Her lips drew back from her fangs without any conscious thought, and her claws cut out of her fingertips.

Four dark shapes fanned out toward her from the open backyard where garbage bags had been cut open and their filth spread out into the weeds. The house behind the four men stood dark and lifeless.

The closest man raised his arm, his gray ski jacket whispering as he shifted. He held a semiautomatic pistol with a silencer. The gun hissed twice. The first shot missed wide as she threw herself to the side. The second shot grazed her head, slicing through her hair and ripping into her scalp. Pain flared from the wound.

She rolled into a crouch, feeling only an intense predator focus. More gun barrels followed her movement, and one of the men on her flank opened fire. Two bullets missed, but the third hit her just above the hip, punching into her guts. She staggered to the side, but her body started to heal almost immediately, her scalp and abdomen knitting together as the seep of her black blood slowed.

One of the shooters cursed in Italian—no,
Sicilian
. Ghost soldiers. They had to be.

She feinted to the right. The pistols swung to follow her lightning-quick move, but she spun back and hurled herself at the first shooter, claws extended, fangs bared. Terror flashed in his eyes. She crashed into him, slamming him into the ground. His pistol flew out of his hands and thudded on the dirt, out of reach.

Several more silenced gunshots whispered through the air. Two hit her in the back, making her jerk. She ignored the bullets and darted her head forward, meaning to tear open the man's throat. Before she could bite, the man reached up and yanked down the collar of his shirt. Brilliant blue-white light burst from a crucifix on a silver chain. This close, the radiance seared into her eyes, and she threw herself off him. She blinked rapidly as she scrambled back, unable to see anything but a lingering ghost image of blue-white floating in her vision.

The other shooters opened fire again, filling the night with the hissing of silencers and the louder ratchet of the pistol slides. She heard, with crystal clarity, the spent shell casings hitting the dirt and weeds with gentle taps. The men's breath rasped in and out of their mouths. Their hearts pounded away like engine pistons.

More rounds tore into her flesh. Three guns fired as fast as the shooters could pull the triggers. Muzzle flashes lit the darkness like strobe lights. A bullet ripped through her left hand, straight through her palm, and her fingers twitched, suddenly cut from her control. Another shot hit her in the kidney, and she felt the organ burst inside her, an overripe tomato crushed in a clenched fist. And still they kept firing. Dirt kicked up around and behind her as bullets struck. She jerked and flailed as bullet after bullet shredded through her body.

Maria fell to the dirt and rolled onto her back. The shooting stopped. Black vampire blood seeped from a half dozen wounds, many of them easily fatal for a human. She could smell cinnamon and a darker, more feral smell, swirling all around her. Blood and metal and sweat—triumph and terror and smokeless powder. She stared up at the moon, an ivory scythe cutting its way across the darkness.

“
Stu Cazzo…
” the man whose throat she'd almost torn out whispered. Hateful blue-white radiance still burned off his crucifix. She squinted, watching out of the corner of her eye as he lifted the crucifix to his lips and kissed it.

Footsteps approached her, barely audible in the dirt and weeds. “
Minchione puttana
.”

Maria started to laugh. Soft laughter, seething with dark amusement, bitter and tainted with anger. Couldn't forget the anger.

“
Dio…
” the walking man said. He halted and raised his pistol again.

She rolled to a crouch with vampire speed and launched herself right at the man on the ground with the crucifix. She gritted her teeth together, squinting and fighting the pain of the hateful blue-white radiance. Her hand stretched out toward him as she hurtled through the air. The assassin flinched backward and thrust the crucifix at her. The light filled the alleyway and painted everything in cold blue and icy death.

Her hand closed on the butt of the dropped pistol. In one smooth, rapier-quick motion she swung the pistol up, so close she need only focus on the man's face and leave the tritium-tipped iron sights blurred, ignoring the painful holy light stabbing into her eyeballs as she pulled the trigger. The gun made a
thwup
sound, and the action clacked as the slide came back and shot forward again. She missed, even from this close. She'd jerked the gun when she'd pulled the trigger, and squinting against the blaze of light hardly helped. The man scrambled backward, still clutching the crucifix in a shaking hand.

Maria steadied herself and aimed again. A bullet whined by her face, so close she felt the breeze of its passing, but she didn't flinch. No adrenaline to make her movements erratic and imprecise. No heartbeat to waver the gun barrel. She squeezed the trigger again. Another
thwup
, and the guy with the crucifix lost his right eye as her bullet punched into his brain.

The man who'd been walking toward her shot again, though he only fired once before the slide locked back, his pistol empty. His shot missed her by at least a foot.

Maria swung her pistol toward him. He spun away and took one running step. She shot him down, putting three bullets in him. He fell into the ruptured bags of garbage in the weeds.

The other two gunmen pulled crucifixes and saint medals out of their shirts, and the alleyway flooded with blue-white blaze. She hissed in pain—a sound that would've horrified her as inhuman only hours ago. She raised the stolen pistol and fired wildly, hoping to hit something.

The last two gunmen scattered, firing back at her as they ran. Bullets cut through the air, humming and whining. Maria emptied the pistol without hitting either of them. She slung it aside into the weeds, turned and dashed back the way she'd come.

She burst from the alleyway onto the street, veered back onto the sidewalk and opened up to a full sprint. A car screeched to a halt and somebody shouted. Didn't matter. She cut off the street and jumped onto the top section of a fire-escape ladder. She scurried up the rungs, past the second and third floors to the three-decker's roof. She ran to the edge and peered down at the street and alley. The body of the man she'd shot in the eye sprawled in dirt stained black with blood.

A car started at the far end of the alleyway, the starter motor grinding and shrieking while a belt voiced a high-pitched screech. She couldn't see the car from here, so she jumped to a lower townhouse roof, landing with a muted thud, and raced toward the sound of the engine, leaping from roof to fence to shed to roof. An engine roared, and she heard tires bite the pavement. She caught only a glimpse of a dark sedan before the car sped out of view.

Fuck.

She squatted at the edge of a mossy tarpaper roof, near a gutter strangled with leaves and stinking of wet decay. She ran a trembling hand through her hair—the hand they'd shot through the palm. For a moment she stared at it. The bullet wound had healed completely. Only a slight redness remained, fading away fast.

The dog had stopped howling. She stood up and looked toward the alley. Nothing. Not even lights coming on or blinds twitching. She stared at the part of Davey Abello's house she could see from this angle. The curtains had been drawn but the lights were on, a perfectly normal house giving no clue it was a meeting place for the syndicate backbone of the city. And why should it? She'd picked it for just that reason—nice and anonymous.

Shit. Someone had come awful goddamn close to having her whacked. And why the hell had that piece-of-shit guy yanked down his shirt to show her the crucifix?

Somebody knew she was vampire.

Easy to say what she
should
do next. Show up at the meeting anyway, as if nothing had happened, and watch faces to see who flinched. But how would she explain away all the bullet holes in her clothes? Besides, she was too damn shaken up—too unnerved and…hungry. Aching hunger.

Damn it. Damn it.
Damn
it. She'd finally clawed her way to the top and now this shit. Those shooters had been speaking
Sicilianu.
They had to be ghost soldiers—Sicilian shooters, dedicated no-nonsense assassins who could do a job, clip anyone from a soldier to a boss to a cop, and leave the country again. They just did the job and got the hell out.

So who'd brought them over? New York? If so, they had to have someone highly placed inside her
borgata
. But how had New York managed to bring in shooters from Sicily so quickly? It'd only been a few days since she'd sent out word agreeing to a meeting. Unless the ghost soldiers had been here already, waiting for their chance…

Had the Commission formally ruled against her and she simply hadn't heard? Making sure she never took her seat for breaking so many rules? Or…was there some Lucatti faction still in play? One of the surviving Lucatti skippers who'd fled Boston? But four shooters? Expensive. It couldn't have been Cojocaru or the Blackstone wolves…so the hit wasn't connected to Karl.

She darted across another rooftop, headed east toward her car, and startled two fighting cats when she leapt a fence into a backyard.

The crucifixes. Those ghost soldiers had
known.
This wasn't just a case of a Catholic man wearing a religious symbol, lucky enough to drive back a vampire trying to sink her fangs into his throat. No, they'd pulled those crucifixes out to stop her. They couldn't have been able to see the blue-white light—she hadn't seen it when she'd been human, when she'd pulled out a crucifix during a meeting with Karl. Yet they'd kept the holy objects hidden until after they'd started firing, because she would've seen the flare of light. And the garbage—they'd strewn it around to mask their human scent, to give cover. The only mistake they'd made—the
only
reason she'd survived—was failing to use the right weapons against her.

So somebody knew she was a vampire, had told the Zips, and had gotten enough of the legends right to almost bring her down. She must have misstepped somehow, been too confident, too willing to accept that humans wouldn't believe in the paranormal, even in the face of suspicion and evidence. But what evidence had she left? She'd been very careful. Limiting her contact with her capos and soldiers, passing most of her information through Passerini…

John Passerini. The cornerstone in this dark cathedral. He had motive to betray her—they'd wrangled for control of the Ricardi family once. By rights, it should've passed to him when her father was murdered. He was the senior Ricardi made man and an extremely competent underboss. There was no
Cosa Nostra
rule that
borgata
leadership was passed down through bloodlines. He was scary intelligent and ruthless. He might seed her fears with information about the New York Families moving against her, bring in ghost soldiers to whack her—and look at that. A problem neatly solved. If she survived, well, she had no direct evidence linking him to the plot. She couldn't get to the ghost soldiers—they might not even speak English, and she didn't speak Sicilian aside from a few curse words. And she'd been running around doing wet work, killing the opposition even though bosses didn't get their hands dirty and women didn't do this kind of business. All of it done at night. God, how careless she'd been. Too damn arrogant.
Stupid
.

Another thought occurred to her. What if
all
her people had been in on it?

No…that was impossible. Wasn't it?

She scanned for another ambush when she made it back to her car, but there was nothing. She'd burned through a lot of power healing, and exhaustion made the anger and fear seem disconnected. Surreal. Too much had happened too fast. She needed time to think. Needed time to decide exactly what she'd do now that she suspected traitors in her family. She needed time to decide a course of action before paranoia seeped in completely.

 

Maria returned to her swanky home on the water, the empty gray warehouse where she hung her spurs nowadays. She'd backtracked, taken random turns, abruptly changed direction and used every trick she knew to throw off any tail that might be tracking her. The tingle and pressure of Xiesha's wards chafed against her skin as she drove her Benz inside one of the metal bay doors. A few moments later, she slipped inside the converted office, dispirited, goddamn
tired
, and shut the door behind her.