Ghost Soldiers (25 page)

More of Cojocaru's army faded out of the rows between stacked containers and equipment to block their flanks and circle around behind, sealing off their retreat. Shadowlings, Nassid and more ghouls. A few creatures of the Old Blood among them—the last wolfbreed werewolf and even a scarred Sidhe dressed in clothes that resembled smoldering stained glass. Cojocaru's acolytes were scattered in the ranks, no longer bothering to shield their power.

Cojocaru nodded at Karl's pistol with a smile. “A gun. A tool of the human oppressors.”

“I like guns. They make such beautiful holes.”

Someone yelled something in Romanian back near the buildings, and Karl heard feet running off. Cojocaru's gaze shifted to the fleeing dockworker, seemed to dismiss him as inconsequential and looked back to Karl. The containership, heedless of the scene south of it on the docks, had begun to back from the cement quay while two tugboats helped move the ship away from its mooring. Soon it'd be too late to reach it, with too much seawater between them to jump aboard.

“I feel great sympathy for you, Karl Vance.” Cojocaru rubbed his chin with one finger as if considering. He paused and his smile was born cruel. “But that doesn't mean I won't do what needs to be done.”

Karl watched him over the gun sight and didn't reply.

Cojocaru spread his hands, palms up—a priest entreating a wayward lamb. “Come. It's not too late. Even now. We have work to do, you and I. Nation-building, a noble cause.”

“I said no.” Karl opened fire—headshots, every one—but Cojocaru never even flinched. Flames from the damned fire cat flared up in a shield. The bullets exploded into sparks and rained down like the sparkling death of fireworks.

The two ghouls started toward him with a hunched gait. He shifted aim and shot one in the left eye, blowing out half its skull. He missed with his next shot, but brought the pistol back on target and squeezed another round off. The silver 9x18mm hollow point punched through the second ghoul's neck. It toppled backward, hands on its throat, black blood pulsing through its fingers as it flopped and writhed on the ground. The succubus scurried behind Cojocaru, hiding, while the rest of his minions surged forward from the stacks of containers, shrieking and raging and howling.

Karl pivoted and sighted in on the nearest forklift parked less than fifty feet off. He squeezed the trigger, and the bullet hit dead center in the propane tank. It left a deep dent but didn't puncture the tank. The ghouls and the werewolf raced past the forklift without slowing. He shot again, but the same thing happened. The slide came back on the empty pistol.
Damn it
. So much for an explosion. He'd gambled and lost. He tossed the empty gun away and drew the silver-bladed long sword, betraying neither his exhaustion nor his pain.

He grabbed Bailey and dragged her forward. She stumbled, eyes wide, almost in shock, but she focused on Cojocaru. A surge of terror cut across the link, and she started to pull away.

“Get to the ship,”
he thought to her, pulling her along as he ran toward Cojocaru.
“I'll handle him.”

Cojocaru smirked and lifted his arms. Glowing lines raced out from a circle of red light flaring around his feet. The lines zigzagged like lightning across the asphalt toward them. Karl didn't veer off, but charged at full speed, moving so fast he could barely be seen.

The racing spell lines converged all at once, shooting straight toward him like glowing arrows. They interlaced beneath him into a complex matrix a dozen feet wide. The trap closed, solidifying into shimmering walls that rose up to block him. He scanned for the weakest interlink in the spell sculpture as the walls closed in. He slammed his fist into the intersection between two shimmering barriers, drawing on all his dark energy. The spell matrix shattered apart with a deafening
crack
. The energy dispersed in a wave strong enough to make Bailey stumble and to slow the creatures chasing them.

Cojocaru's smile widened. He thrust out a hand, palm out, two fingers raised, and more power surged as he built another spell.

Karl jumped, swinging back the sword for a monstrous strike, intending to cleave the sorcerer's skull. The silver blade whistled as it cut downward. Cojocaru shifted his hand and a curved wall of something like smoked glass thrust from the ground between them. Karl yelled as he slammed the sword edge into the barrier. Sparks shot out in every direction. An ear-splitting screech ripped the night, a metal-on-metal scream that echoed all across the shipyard.

The barrier shunted Karl's force aside, the blade careened off to the left, and he barely kept his feet when he landed. Beside him, Bailey launched herself into Naoimy. The succubus slipped away from Bailey's slashing claws, and her hair braid snapped, sending needles at Bailey's face. Bailey dodged, but two of the needles caught her in the shoulder. She cried out and stumbled, shaking her head as if to clear it, and he felt sudden lust and confusion surge across their link.

Karl spun and sliced clean through one of Naoimy's black wings. She wailed as part of the severed wing fell away, dissolving into fluttering wisps and vanishing. He pivoted and slashed again. She arched back, nimble as a contortionist, but his sword cut through the end of her braid, sending a drift of her sharp hair falling to the ground like fallen pine needles. She bounded backward, rage and pain marring her beautiful face.

“Karl!” Bailey yelled, staring behind him.

He dropped as he spun back to Cojocaru. A surge of energy prickled along his skin and scalp, just missing him as he crouched. Cojocaru held his hands in front of him. Between his palms he'd ripped a seemingly two-dimensional hole in reality that shimmered along the edges. He drew power through the wormhole and lanced it into a tightly matrixed stream of white energy. The spell sheared through a shipping container as cleanly as a laser.

Karl thrust with the sword at Cojocaru's guts. The fire cat jumped between them, flaring up into a huge inferno of black-green flames, a wall of fire sending tongues of flame reaching for him like fiery arms. He grabbed Bailey, pulling her out of range. They ran as the strange fire swirled after them, spreading across the concrete quay and throwing green light off the water.

Their freighter had been pushed farther out, almost too far. Behind them, the crackle of flames died as abruptly as it had flared to life, sucked back into the fire cat. Something hissed past them as they came to the end of the pier—a splash of corrosive power. Neither of them slowed. The ship's deck was now too high and the hull too far away to reach anymore by leaping—

“The tugs!” he yelled.

Both of them jumped for the nearest tugboat guiding the containership. They sailed over the gunwale and landed hard on the main deck at the tug's aft end. He slid on the deck and slammed into a winch, his wound exploding with agony. Bailey pulled herself out of a pile of thick rope. He could hear radio chatter and footsteps on the upper deck. Someone opened the wheelhouse door and glanced aft. They ducked out of view, slipped through the shadows along the port side of the tug and raced for the bow.

The black and red hull of the freighter loomed above them. They launched themselves off the tugboat at the containership and landed halfway up the hull. Bailey missed her grip. He shot out his hand and grabbed her, his wounded arm wailing and almost giving out with the strain. He gritted his teeth against a scream and hauled her up until she could catch hold of the metal. They scaled toward the deck, and as they climbed, Karl wrapped dark energy around them, not making them invisible, but making them slippery to see, encouraging a person's gaze to slide over them without registering anything particularly strange about two figures scaling the hull of a freighter without ropes.

They reached the top and vaulted over the railing. They crouched near two stacks of intermodal containers, hidden from the bridge. Deckhands clustered at the railings, all of them staring back at the pier and pointing and yelling, but the deck was vast and the nearest man stood no closer than fifty feet away. None of them appeared to have noticed Karl or Bailey climb aboard.

He looked back at the receding dock. Cojocaru walked toward the ship, his steps unhurried. He approached alone, without even his fire cat at his side. His followers swarmed at the far end of the dock, escaping toward the machining shop and storage warehouses, leaving behind the ghouls he'd shot. At the far end of the shipyard, police cruisers raced through the gates with lights flashing and sirens screaming.

Cojocaru stopped at the edge of the concrete dock. The sorcerer didn't seem to care he was visible to every sailor on the deck. Then he flicked his hand, and Karl sensed a surge of power. He ducked, pulling Bailey down, but nothing happened. He risked a look over the railing only to see Cojocaru turn on his heel and walk back toward the chaos at the end of the quay where the flat pop of the gunshots echoed across the water, audible over the rumble of the tugboat engines.

In the east, the sky had already started to lighten. Dawn was no more than an hour off. He reached over and yanked out both the needles stuck in Bailey's flesh. She hissed in pain. Touching them made him feel giddy, almost drunk, before his healing powers purged the sensation. He flung the needles over the side before sending her a thought across their link:
“Come on. The sun.”

Bailey followed as he slipped around the backside of the deck, away from the sailors staring at the docks. Either the captain on the bridge didn't want anything to do with the insanity on the berth behind him and just wanted to get his ship clear, or the tugs wouldn't stop once they'd begun, steadily guiding the ship out to sea. Someone on the bridge deck shouted in Romanian, and one of the sailors kept yelling something back. He glanced at Bailey for translation. She shook her head. “They think it's a Hollywood movie.”

With everyone distracted it was easy to slip through the ship into the hold, climb to the middle of a stack of shipping containers and break the seal. He unlatched the lock rods and opened the door. Inside, 55-gallon drums sat on pallets, secured by straps. The container held a sickly sweet chemical smell. Not comfortable perhaps, but safe from sunlight.

“What if someone sees the broken seal?” Bailey asked.

“If it's daylight, we're screwed.”

“That's happy news.”

He couldn't lock the door again from inside, so he cut one of the straps free with a claw, tied it to the outside lock rod and pulled it shut again. It wouldn't pass close scrutiny, but it'd keep the door from swinging free in transit and drawing attention.

“I feel hungry again,” Bailey said. “Weaker. Didn't we just feed?”

“We burned through a lot of power, and we're using more to heal.” He tried to ignore his exhaustion and pain, but it wasn't easy. “If we could feed again, we'd heal faster, but we can't on the ship. These people aren't criminals.”

Bailey's eyes glowed red in the darkness. “You heard Deor. Your amnesty's done. You don't have to hold to that code anymore.”

“The code was always for me. Not for them.”

She closed her eyes and stayed silent for a long time. Finally, just as the sun was about to rise, she spoke again. “You're a good man, Karl Vance.”

He said nothing.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Windows

Maria had been a made woman for little more than a week when Little Ricky finally called her. She rejected his first two choices for a meeting place out of hand—a strip club or an elementary school playground—and settled on the convenience store across the street from his place. No running through the shadows tonight; she took her Mercedes.

It had rained during the day, and the puddles reflected neon and streetlights. She parked by a payphone marred with graffiti and missing its handset. A wonder the damn things were around at all now that everyone had cell phones.

Soon, she spotted Little Ricky hustling across the street. Tires squealed and a horn blared. She heard him yell, “Go fuck a drunk mule!” A moment later he peered into her passenger window, cupping his hands around his eyes as he tried to see inside.

She rolled down the window a crack. “Get in.”

He opened the door and flopped into the leather seat. She smelled sweat and some kind of body wash she vaguely remembered being marketed as attracting women, and warm blood rushing beneath skin, very close. She kept a tight leash on her hunger. It hadn't been that long since she'd last fed. She sure as hell didn't need to feed now, and certainly not on Little Ricky.

“Are you wearing a wire, Little Ricky?” She couldn't smell anything that might've been a wire, neither metal nor plastic, except for what was in the car, but one couldn't be too cautious.

“Shit, no. What the fuck?”

“Because I'd have to do bad things, you know, if you were wearing a wire. Which you're not.”

Little Ricky shook his head, eyes wide, and his dreadlocks flopped around his head like the dirty strands of a mop. She liked him, even though she should've loathed him as an informer, which made her threat all bark, no bite, if she could be permitted the phrase. If she found a wire on him, she'd just kick his ass out of her car instead of killing him. Hell, maybe she'd turned into a great big soft-serve ice cream.

“Why don't you lift up your shirt and show me your chest,” she said. “Just for safety's sake. Pretend you're doing a strip tease for little old me.”

Little Ricky slowly lifted his T-shirt with R2-D2 on the front, showing her a significant paunch, a deep cave of a belly button and a scraggle of hair across his chest. But no wire. “Happy?”

“Thanks. Almost as good as Chippendales,” she said. Ricky blushed, which for some odd reason made her like him more. “Now…what'd you find out?”

“I don't know if it's anything, but it's pretty much all I could dig up. Some bookies were upset you upped your cut of their cream. And some construction company guy, I don't know—putting in windows as fuckin' government work or something, upgrading energy savings. Anyway, that guy was bitching about having to kick up to some
new
guy who muscled in—”