Ghost Soldiers (29 page)

Maria started to laugh.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Old Friends, Older Enemies

They waited until after midnight the next night to leave the warehouse, though Maria seethed with impatience. Xiesha chose a site in Beacon Hill for the spell-working and loaded two huge suitcases, a carry-on case, a duffel bag and a backpack into the rear seat and trunk of the Mercedes. The suitcases held Xiesha's supplies and all sorts of heavy weapons raided from Karl's collection. They'd brought so much nasty artillery that Maria started to worry about their chances of pulling this off, but she kept her unease to herself. This was her idea, and she'd pushed for it. For her part, Xiesha seemed quieter, and yet less serene. Maria had never seen her pensive before, and
certainly
not nervous—not even when Delgado's vampire sirelings had assaulted their old apartment.

Disturbing.

They rode in silence until Maria turned onto Cambridge Street, heading west. From the road, she could see the dark outline of the high-rise building where she'd once lived with Karl, just north of the Beacon Hill area. Memories of her time there with Karl, even
good
memories, suddenly made the quiet seem too oppressive, too stifling, like being smothered with a pillow or drowning in warm sweat. She searched for something, anything, to say.

“Do you dream?” she asked.

“I can send my mind into the Dreamtime, yes.”

“Is that the same as dreaming?”

“More structured. Self-aware, but again, yes.”

“I keep dreaming about Karl. Dreams of him on trial somewhere, surrounded by people who want to kill him. Dreams of him connected to some vampire woman. It's weird. Why do I see this stuff?”

Xiesha paused. “Perhaps you are the first vampire to access the Dreaming.”

“Unique…or a freak?”

“Perhaps simply rare.”

Maria didn't reply. She swung a U-turn around an island and turned onto Russell Street, cruising up a narrow, tree-lined avenue with brick row houses and gas lampposts casting circles of mellow light. They passed a basketball court, and beside it a garden courtyard filled with trees. A brick wall topped with a black iron fence caged off both the courtyard and ball court. The foliage, a welcome break in the brick facades, mostly obscured a huge Federal-style building.

“The game arena,” Xiesha said. “We'll work the spell matrix there.”

Maria glanced at her. “You want to work magic in the middle of a basketball court?”

“We'll take precautions.”

“Beacon Hill's packed with people. We could find emptier parts of the city, you know.”

“This neighborhood holds old magic in its bones. A ley line runs through here as well. For this working, I must tap a lot of power.”

“Shit.” She drove up the street, searching for a parking spot. Only one side of the street allowed parking and the residents had claimed most of it, but she finally found a space at the top of the avenue. When she turned off the engine, she could hear the deep thump of bass rumbling from a stereo. A few row houses up, she could see a bunch of college-age kids, longneck bottles in hand, dancing and partying inside one of the apartments, and that brought back a flood of memories of her years at Boston University. God, life had been so much simpler.

They unloaded the cases and bags and hurried toward the court. The suitcase wheels clattered on the street and sidewalks. They passed along the low brick wall with the iron fence and the garden in front of the Peter Faneuil House, a former school now converted to affordable housing. No one in the courtyard. All the red benches sat empty. The shadows pooled under the branches where the light wouldn't reach. Cars still rushed past down on Cambridge, even this late, but nothing moved on this street.

They walked through a black iron gate and stepped onto the basketball court. Maria sensed the familiar touch of Xiesha's wards as soon as she crossed from the sidewalk to the court surface.

Xiesha noticed her reaction. “I borrowed your car and came here earlier today to prep while the sun was still out. I set wards around the court to drive off players and discourage their return.” She made a strange wave-pattern motion with one hand that didn't mean anything to Maria. “A subtle matrix.”

The solitary basketball hoop had a broken chain net, one strand of metal loops hanging down like a rope of intestine dangling from a stomach wound. When the breeze stirred the chains, they rattled with a soft, atonal clinking. Light from the gas lamps didn't reach far. The place seemed ominous—
expectant
. Or maybe that was just her, projecting.

“Why not the garden next door?” she asked. “More cover. This place is wide open.”

“Too much risk. Even this late at night there might be a tenant coming or going. We can't risk some innocent person walking through the middle of my matrix. This area I can shield and conceal for the time I need to forge the spell sculpture.”

They wheeled the suitcases to the middle of the court. She drew her Glock 17 from beneath her leather jacket and worked the slide.

Xiesha glanced at the 9mm. “You should start with the rocket launcher.”

“Not reassuring.”

“It wasn't meant to be.”

Together they unloaded the suitcases, backpack and duffel bag, bringing out the serious hardware—a gun nut's wet dream and a laundry list of weaponry Xiesha had rattled off, name by name, when they'd loaded the cases.

First, Maria withdrew a RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher, wedged diagonally inside the case to fit. Where Karl had procured one of those goddamn things she intended to ask when she saw him again. They had three warheads for it—Xie had said they were all high-explosive anti-tank rounds. Next came an AK-47 assault rifle. Two clips, each loaded down with intermixed 7.62mm silver and incendiary rounds. A shotgun, 12-gauge Remington 870, for Xiesha. Grenades—a concussion grenade, a fragmentation grenade and two thermate incendiary grenades. Serious fucking business, all of it—well, except for the roll of duct tape.

Yet, the worst just might've been the final weapon. Xiesha had brought the flintlock pistol—the one with its barrel covered in runes and symbols, the single raven's feather dangling from a leather cord tied to an eyelet in the pistol's handle. Maria put off unpacking the pistol until last. It projected an aura of black rot and death clearly visible to her vampire eyes. The polished wood grip felt warm against her skin. She'd touched the thing once before, and Karl had warned her about it, but now the pistol seemed aware of her, seemed to welcome her touch and greet her with its eagerness to shoot.

She set it down on the court quickly and wiped her hand on her pants. Xiesha had loaded it before they'd left, and she hadn't allowed Maria to watch. Something about that damn gun…

“Only use it if all else fails,” Xiesha said softly. “Thumb back the hammer and don't miss.”

“Where the hell did Karl get something like that?”

“He never said.” Xiesha unzipped a suitcase and threw back the top. She pulled out four Christmas tree stands, a small pile of aluminum framing and a brown leather case in a drift of white packing peanuts. She opened the case and took out four purple crystals before beginning to assemble the pieces of aluminum framing. She talked as she worked.

“These will amplify the energy I'll be summoning and help lock down the wards. The wards will keep out humans, fade us from view and reflect back sound so we don't have authorities interfering. But they'll degrade over time.” She pointed at the RPG launcher. “Especially if we use that. I shall have my hands full opening a rift and won't be able to recharge the wards as they degrade. We won't have much time once this starts.”

Maria nodded. She crouched down and slid one of the long rockets into the launcher. Xiesha had given her a quick overview, and the weapon wasn't complex, but she sure as shit had never fired anything like this before. They'd be shooting toward the far brick wall, but if she missed and someone innocent got hurt…well, she didn't want to think about that.

“We may be fortunate,” Xiesha continued. “I may tear open a rift and be able to shut it again without alerting any of those who wait for me to disturb the branes—”

“My brain's certainly disturbed by it.”

“—though I don't think it likely. The Thorn will learn our position, but we can escape before they arrive. I will find Karl. You stop anything from invading this world.”

Maria swept a hand at all the weaponry. “What if these don't work?”

“Then I think you might be able to describe us, and I paraphrase you, as ‘totally fucked'.”

Xie set out the modified tree stands and then painted a series of runes and glyphs with a thin brush and a mason jar full of what appeared to be mercury. She set a crystal bowl near the free throw line, and then walked to each corner of the court in a diagonal line from the center. She said nothing, but her hands blurred in exceedingly intricate patterns, contorting, twisting and shifting in a dance so fast Maria found it difficult to track her individual hand positions. As she approached the crystals, they glowed with a soft purple light. Energy, great streaming lines of it that Maria could sense but couldn't quite see, coalesced around Xiesha. She fixed her hands in one final position, both arms thrust straight out, palms outward, all fingers curled except the index, which pointed toward the sky, and her thumbs hooked in a right angle U. A deep, directionless sound filled the air—a humming that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere around them.

“The wards are in place.” Xiesha relaxed, and her hands dropped to her sides. “Now for the next matrix.”

Maria walked over to the pile of guns she'd laid out above the three-point arc. “Let's do it.”

Xiesha nodded, faced the hoop and closed her eyes. Her lips began to move as if she formed words, but Maria, even with her enhanced vampire senses, could hear none of them. Once again, energy built around her, looping and interlacing, forming complex patterns that Maria didn't see so much as feel. The painted glyphs burst into white sparks, like spit from an arc welder, and started to burn without giving off smoke. The crystals flared brighter.

Xiesha knelt over the crystal bowl and poured in water from two reused gallon milk containers. The energy wound tighter as her hands danced again, an ever-increasing amount of power forged into an unseen latticework around them. The hairs on Maria's arms stood upright.

Xiesha's voice sounded strained. “I'm about to break the Seam.”

Maria picked up the RPG launcher and set it on her shoulder. She knelt to the side and a little behind Xiesha, next to the arrayed weapons. Her skin felt corpse-cold. Her fingers trembled, just the slightest bit, as she settled her hands around the launcher's twin handles. She didn't want to use it. It
felt
dangerous, like pressing a coral snake against her neck.

A sound like tearing metal rent the stillness. The water in the scrying bowl flared with shimmering sky-blue light, flash-pinning Xiesha's shadow to the ground behind her. A rip appeared in the air three feet above the surface of the water. It was two dimensional, as if Maria stared at a flat projection on an invisible wall. The image of the basketball hoop folded back and the rift widened. A strange swirling mix of colors streamed out in shades of blue, purple, red and black, arcing tubes of shimmering energy like captured lightning, but tightly contained and inter-threaded. The image inside the rift rotated as Xiesha turned her right hand. She pushed her other hand forward and the scene changed, blurring through an explosion of lights and colors too fast for Maria to recognize anything. Then the strange images vanished and a new image stood revealed.

“That's Boston Harbor!” Maria clambered back to her feet, staring. A dark ocean spread in the center of the rift, and a large ship plowed through the waves. In the distance, far across the water, she recognized the lights of the Boston skyline, the arch of Rowes Wharf, the washboard-skyscraper Federal Reserve Bank, the rounded towers of International Place.

Xiesha made no answer. Cords stood out on her neck and arms as stiff as steel cables. She moved her hands farther apart. The rip in the fabric of reality, of space-time or whatever Xie's magic manipulated, opened even wider. She rotated her hands and pointed toward the ship. It was as if a movie camera suddenly zoomed in, rushing down through the air. The dirty, scarred deck grew larger, larger, and the invisible camera shot through it to the inside of the cargo hold. There was very little light, but she saw Karl immediately. He leaned against the inner hull, his arms crossed, his head down and his face in deeper shadow.

She took a step toward the image. She couldn't help it. “Get the name of the ship!”

Xiesha started to pull the view back, and Maria caught a glimpse of a name on the ship hull—something
Tulo
or
Talos
.

A low rumble reverberated throughout the court. The rumble died, but a clap sounded, sharp as a slap across the face, followed by a loud, modulating hum—a meditative
ohm
voiced by a machine. In the northeastern corner of the court something rippled in the air, distorting light waves until things appeared to stretch like taffy. A red spot hovered eight feet above the ground. As she watched, the spot cut downward, slicing open reality as neatly as a scalpel blade.

Xiesha said something in a guttural tongue. The image above the water imploded back into itself and vanished. She whirled toward the expanding tear in space-time, planted her feet wide apart and thrust out both hands. Maria felt her power build like a cresting wave. For a moment the cut started to seal itself back up again. Déjà vu swept over Maria, making things seem even more disconnected and unreal. Dreamlike. Nightmarelike.

“They're too strong,” Xie said. “I can't seal it. Get ready. Here they come.”

Chapter Thirty: Kyveryn

The rip in the Seam split wider. Maria dropped to one knee and raised the RPG launcher. She shoved back the panic making her thoughts tumble crazily through her head and focused on keeping her hands steady as she peered through the optics.