Ghost Soldiers (26 page)

“Wait a minute. What's the window guy's name?”

“Manny something. Manny…Hernandez.”

“That's
my
racket.” She had several contractors kicking back a percentage of every installed so-called “energy efficient” window for subsidized public housing, a green program funded by the government. She had Davey Abello picking up the envelopes, since she wasn't available during the day, of course. “Who's moving on it?”

Little Ricky paused. “Dude was antsy. Didn't want to be caught in the middle. Said it was Passerini, and the Cleaver's got a reputation as a guy you don't fuck with. Even I know that.”

Son of a bitch. “You sure he fingered Passerini?”

Little Ricky glanced at her and shrugged. “That's what he said.” He frowned. “Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's in trouble.”

“Nobody's in trouble. Just a little mix up, that's all.”

“Yeah, that's not what your face says.”

She ignored that. “Anything on any Romanian or Blackstone?”

“Nothing about Romanians.” He shrugged again. “Blackstone's some high-end corporation-conglomerate thing. Got a place downtown. That's all. Anyway, this is for the payment you gave me on retainer.” He laughed. “Look, Ma, I'm a fuckin' lawyer. Anyway. You want me to keep lookin', I'll need another.”

“No.” Her voice was flat, hiding behind the uninflected words. “I think I know all I need to know.”
John, you bastard
.

Little Ricky watched her for a second. “Hey, well, it's been fun. Actually, no, it hasn't.” He popped open the door and struggled out of the car. When he at last succeeded, he leaned back in. “Don't tell Karl I said hi.”

“How's the little woman?”

He smiled. “Ah, you know. Her back hurts. She was barfing everything out a month ago. Now she tells me she's retaining water. I don't get much action anymore.”

“Action got you into trouble in the first place. You feel the baby kick yet?”

His grin dialed up to ten. “Yeah. Most fuckin' wicked thing ever.”

“You take care of yourself, Little Ricky. Stay out of this shit from now on. I'm serious. People who talk…well, they don't get happy endings.”

He shrugged and appeared uncomfortable. He started to close the door, and she called out, “Don't tell Tanya I said hi, either.”

He ducked his head and gaped at her before he burst out laughing. “Don't worry, I won't.”

He shut the door, and she watched him hurry across the parking lot, beneath a pool of yellow in the wash of a streetlight, and run across the street only to nearly get hit again. She shook her head.

It was suddenly very quiet. She stared at the vandalized payphone, her thoughts shooting through her mind like meteors. Still early. More than enough time to pay a visit to her underboss, John “The Cleaver” Passerini. Questions had to be answered, and the one that mattered most was why he'd chosen to betray her.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Belly of the Whale

In the darkness inside the MCS
Talos
's hold, things became a never-ending lift and fall, a sloshing up and down that brought disorientation and a feeling of disconnection from the world beyond the hull. Much of the time the freighter was so massive that the motion of the water could scarcely be noticed, but they'd hit a patch of rough seas shortly after sundown. Knowing the night sky and cool sea air was but a deck above them, past a few steel supports and reinforced plating, was even worse than the seesaw rise and fall of the ship, and it slowly cut at him as the hours passed.

“I'm hungry,” Bailey whispered. She shivered next to him as they sat on the steel drums. The glow in her eyes was weaker. Her unseen wound—the one to her spirit wolf—still ate away at her aura, a black and brown slash he could sense across their link.

The MCS
Talos
had stopped in Naples, and they'd almost met disaster. Some of the top deck containers had been unloaded in the daylight, and the lower hold had been opened. Karl had awakened after sunset to find the cranes still hard at work and crewmen in the hold. They'd had to flee the ship and hide in the warehouses until all the new containers had been loaded. Hiding among all the dockworkers and deckhands had required immense control because the bloodlust gnawed at them both. They'd stowed away again in the same hold, the newest load bound directly for Conley Terminal in Boston Harbor. A bullet dodged…for now.

“I'm hungry,” Bailey said again, a little louder.

He looked at her. Her blue hair stood up in chaotic spikes, and her roots showed. Blonde. She was a blonde.

“A few days. We'll be home.”

“I don't think I can wait. It
eats
at me.”

“Think of something else,” he said. “Keep your mind off it.”

She said nothing for a long time until she asked, “Will my wolf be okay?”

“I think so.”

“Deor shot her. Shot her right in the stomach.”

Not long ago he'd destroyed a spirit wolf belonging to a vampire named Minsku. He didn't know whether she could've summoned it again because he'd killed her shortly after the wolf. He tried shifting the conversation to something else. “Did you know that vampire hunter?”

She wrapped her arms around herself and stared at the corrugated metal walls. “No. I heard about him. The top number-one guy, an albino who hunts vampires—how're you not going to hear about a guy like that?”

“He was good.”

Bailey looked at him. “He shot my wolf.”

Karl didn't reply. After a moment, Bailey continued. “Do you have your own wolf?”

“No.” He paused. So much for avoiding the topic. “A friend of mine did. A long time ago.”

“What happened to him?”

“Another vampire killed him.”

She ran her claw tip along the rim of a drum, making a soft scraping sound. “There's so much death around us. So…why am I special? With the wolf, I mean.”

“I'll tell you what my friend told me, but I don't know if it's truth or myth. Supposedly, the ancestors of vampires fled a city far across space—a city at the nexus of a bunch of dimensions, just above the gates of Hell—”

“In some places it's called Entropy,” Bailey said, nodding. “The City of Event Horizon.”

“You know this story then?”

She shrugged. “I've heard of the Great Migration. A bunch of creatures came through a wormhole gate to Earth. Happened in Sumer, Mesopotamia. Way, way back. The Order's spent most of its history erasing all traces of it. But why me specifically? Why can I make a wolf and you can't?”

“I don't know. It's a spectral wolf familiar created directly from your aura, your inner dark energy. I've heard a vampire's specific powers are tied to their aura, perhaps to their DNA at the time of their Turning. I've never seen a spirit wolf exactly like yours, though.”

“I'm going to name her Smoke.” Her hands dropped to her belly and rested there, as if she kept the wolf in her womb. “What was your friend's name? The one who had a wolf friend?”

“John Avalon.”

“Do you miss him?”

He didn't answer. A simple yes wouldn't convey how loss felt over years stretching into the hundreds. How the loss deepened, like rainwater filling a rock quarry, until the lake was still and deep and cold.

“This isn't working,” she said. “God, I'm so fucking hungry.”

Lines of strain marred her young, pretty face. She looked very small, very exhausted, sitting on the steel drum with her arms wrapped around her legs and her chin on her knees, the bottom of her stained white coat pooled around her, her glowing eyes betraying the hunger loose inside.

“Come here,” he said softly.

She came over, her posture uncertain, her movements timid.

He flexed out a claw. With the tip he cut deep into a vein in his arm, reopening the same wound he'd first fed her from. His black vampire blood seeped out. She stared at it wide-eyed. He could feel her desire, almost sexual in its intensity, burning inside her.

He offered his arm. “Drink.”

Bailey needed no further prodding. She latched onto the wound and drank his blood. He grew weaker, steadily weaker, as she sucked. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she made little humming sounds, little content sounds, in her throat. After a few minutes he pushed her away. For an instant she resisted, but he forced his arm away from her lips, and she sat back. She watched as he wrapped up the wound again.

“Thank you.” Bailey licked her lips, seemed to realize what she was doing and stopped. “Maria's lucky.”

“I'm the one who's lucky.”

She grinned. “You're lucky together then. Sometimes I can sense how you feel for her. Most of the time you keep it hidden.”

“Not hidden. Controlled.”

“Is there really a difference?”

He didn't answer. The ship shot upward ten feet in the air as it climbed a wave, only to plummet back down again. The barrels shifted slightly, straining against their straps. His arm ached from the reopened wound—a grinding, relentless and deep ache. The bullet wound in his arm sent black lightning bolts of pain through his body. The bite wounds on his forearm and the claw gouges on his back still hummed faintly with pain. The burns on his hand from where he'd gripped the sword sang along in the tune of agony. It was a wonder he could move at all.

“What if Cojocaru follows us across the ocean?” she asked after a few moments.

“I'll kill him and finish the job.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Showdown

John Passerini lived in Belmont. His place didn't quite belong with the mansions on Belmont Hill, but his neighborhood was quiet and upscale, a haven of perfect lawns and three-car garages. A nice place to die.

Maria climbed over the stone wall in a place where no ivy grew and stalked across the yard, moving without sound. No sign of dogs, but she could smell a cat—spray and scent marks on tree trunks and the porch. She caught sight of the cat sleeping on a patio sofa as she scaled the porch railing. The cat startled and jerked to its feet with its claws out. Its gold eyes flared wide in the darkness before it tore off the sofa and streaked down the porch steps.

She angled toward the front door but stopped when she saw a blue-white spark above the doorframe growing brighter, like a star gradually revealed through a drifting cloud. Her lips drew back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl. The light intensified, hurting her eyes and bathing the porch in cold, pure illumination. A tiny crucifix hung on a nail above the threshold.

Disturbing. John might be Catholic, at least nominally, but this reminded her of Stefano Lucatti's mansion and all its protections against the darker wanderers of the night. She remembered the way John had stared at her when he'd stabbed her finger with that needle, and her black blood…

She hopped the railing, landing silently in the grass, and circled to the back door. The windows of the house were dark, the blinds closed. She listened for sounds inside the house or from someone lying in wait in the darkness and heard nothing but the distant hum and hiss of traffic and a plane flying far overhead. She'd brought her Glock 9mm, just in case, shoved into her waistband at the small of her back. Carefully, she peeked around the corner of the house. Another crucifix hung over the back door, glowing faintly like a propane flame.

Damn it.

She looked up the sheer side of the house to the second-floor windows. No sign of any other holy symbols. The hard way, then. She settled her hands against the clapboard sides, feeling the texture of the siding cool beneath her fingers, coated with a thin layer of pollen and dust. She began to scale the outer wall. Climbing burned some of her energy but not much, since her body seemed to weigh little, and the textured surface of the house was filled with a million miniscule cracks and crevasses she used to pull herself up.

She crawled from window to window, making no sound, knowing there wasn't much risk she'd be seen by neighbors while sticking to the wall like a fly. The house sat back from the road, and bushes and trees grew on either side of the fences separating the yards. She listened at each window. The fourth window over she heard the sound of gentle snoring, but it sounded light, like the breathing of a child. John had kids, a boy and a girl. She'd first met them at a cookout her father had thrown in Martha's Vineyard one year. She hung there for a long time, her eyes closed, listening to the soft breathing. Once again seeing her father die in front of her, fed to vampires. Not sure at all she could do the same to John after hearing those soft child snores. Not sure at all.

She found the master bedroom on the opposite side of the house, with a balcony and French doors guarded by another crucifix. She clung to the siding at one of the windows and tapped at the glass.
Tap. Tap.
Pause.
Tap. Tap.

Footsteps padded across the floor toward the window. The curtain twitched aside, and she stared right into the barrel of a semiautomatic pistol in John's hand. He didn't seem shocked to find her clinging to the sheer side of a second-story bedroom window, and that told her everything she needed to know.

She lifted one hand and crooked a finger at him in a come-hither gesture. He stared at her for so long she wondered if he'd just open fire through the glass. Finally he nodded and let the curtains fall.

She waited for him on the side porch where there were no crucifixes to burn against her. He wouldn't run. He was a man of honor of the old breed. Besides, where could he hope to go?

The trees stirred in the breeze, their dark leaves fluttering like thousands of black wings in the shadows. She stood and watched the leaves shift and dance while she thought about John's kids asleep upstairs. A memory slipped into her mind of her father drinking brandy on the porch at his place in Martha's Vineyard, the geese flying overhead. This led to memories of her brother—not her asshole half-brother, Roberto Pulani, but her real brother, Paul. Just kids, both of them, searching for clams and starfish in tide pools, walking on the rocks, their jeans rolled up to the knees. A few times he'd bought her ice cream during those humid, oppressive late-summer New England days when it seemed the entire world would suffocate beneath a moist wet blanket. They'd sit at a picnic table and eat the ice cream cones. He'd talk about the Red Sox, and she'd just listen, though she'd never given a damn for baseball. And then he'd gotten older, traded her in for his friends…