Get in. Do the job. Get out. If only it were that easy.

Ghost Soldiers

© 2011 Keith Melton

The Nightfall Syndicate, Book 2

Vampire hit man Karl Vance has a new target: a rogue, charismatic sorcerer building an army of paranormal creatures in Eastern Europe. The stakes have never been higher, nor the odds so long, but he’s in too deep to turn back. If Karl fails to kill, the powerful Order of the Thorn will hunt down Maria Ricardi, the vampire he loves, and destroy everything he’s fighting for.

When Karl is cut off in enemy badlands, he’s reduced to survival mode, doing the kinds of things he’d sworn would never be part of his vampire existence. Things that will forever color his relationship with Maria…if he survives to see her again.

In Boston, Maria is haunted by disturbing dreams of Karl as she struggles to keep control of her mafia syndicate against a growing tide of threats—traitors, FBI agents, hostile crime families, and the fear that power will turn her into a creature like her hated Master, Delgado. Then she discovers Karl is walking straight into a deadly trap…and there may be nothing she can do to stop it in time.

Warning: Explicit language and intense, violent content. Assassinations, betrayals, paranormal warfare, explosions, gangland slayings, chaos, calamity, rampant pandemonium, and an occasional fiery explosion.

Enjoy the following excerpt for Ghost Soldiers:

Karl stared through the scope of the M82 Barrett sniper rifle, firing from the prone position, one finger resting along the outside edge of the trigger guard, ready to finish the job and get out. Now if only he could find Cojocaru and put the crosshairs on him…

His sniper nest was hidden on a rocky outcropping, surrounded by evergreen trees and looking down into a valley sloping between mountain ridges. He wore black, but not a ghillie suit, and he hadn’t painted his face since he could weave darkness to conceal his position, negating the need for the elaborate camouflage suit. Surprise would work in his favor, but he wouldn’t stay hidden after the first shot, not against the small army Cojocaru had amassed. Both last night and tonight he’d expected to find an ambush waiting in the forest as he stalked to his firing position, but there’d been nothing. No sign of wolves or ghouls or sorcerer.

It made him more uneasy, not less.

“I count forty-four hostiles,” Bailey said over his headset earpiece. “And five more in the tree line.”

The shot, when he took it, would be in the four hundred and thirty to four hundred and fifty meter range, the distances on his range card all verified last night from this exact position via a laser range finder, and all within his comfort zone with the rifle.

He waited, scanning with the riflescope as she scanned with the camera. A vampire had advantages over a human sniper. A heart which did not beat. No need to breathe. He could see in the darkness. His hands remained completely still, he could lie motionless for hours, and even the chill lingering in the air didn’t bother him. Every part of him was ready to take the shot when it finally came.

The valley below was inaccessible by road, the clearing bordered on all sides by trees and thick undergrowth. An area about fifty meters across had been dug up, the earth turned over and tamped flat again. Farther out, the wild grasses had been mown all the way to the trees.

He swept the scope farther around the clearing’s perimeter. The rest of the creatures were a wild clash of nasty species, gray-skinned Nassid, shadowlings and more, but each wore the same slave collar. He sighted in on one of the three werewolves loping along the edges of the green firelight. The werewolf was in its wolfbreed form—the upright man and wolf hybrid they preferred for combat—and lifted its muzzle to scent the air, but Karl was far enough away to be safe from their keen noses.

A succubus swooped low from time to time, her dark wings like black smoke pouring from between her shoulders. She was a high-priority threat because she could fly.

He counted dozens of ghouls, their gray flesh sewn with heavy black stitches and their skin ritually scarified. None of them had cheeks or lips, so he could peer right through to their jawbones and sharpened teeth. He hated ghouls. He’d killed one once below a tavern in London and burned the place down along with it.

Another flying creature skip-hopped with a bird-like strut—something very thin with a human body, black wings for arms and the head of a raven. No vampires, though. Or not that he’d seen so far.

He silently cursed the Thorn for allowing him no other weapons except the .50 caliber rifle. His SIG-Sauer, his silver knife or any other secondary weapon would’ve made him less vulnerable. He didn’t even have a spotter next to him, watching his back and able to give support with an assault rifle. If he missed or somehow failed to kill Cojocaru, he’d have hell crashing down on his head, with only his claws and fangs to fight back against so many. Grim business no matter how he looked at it.

Was it paranoid to suspect the Order of the Thorn didn’t mean for him to come out of this in one piece?

 “I’ve got Cojocaru.” Bailey’s voice crackled over the headset. “In motion through the ranks, moving east toward the vampire. Repeat, positive ID on primary target, over.”

It took Karl a moment to dial in on him. Cojocaru was wrapped in a red cloak like the others, but he’d pushed back his hood, revealing his face. The same severe features Karl remembered from the photo on Bailey’s screen. The ex-military man who’d sicced his ghouls, Nassid and wolves on those humans who’d had the bad luck to stumble across his path. The sorcerer who, according to the Thorn, was just another cold-blooded would-be tyrant, wanting to control, eager to coalesce power around himself, and using the strength of others to do so. Karl had seen the same thing happen in the world for hundreds of years. Nothing ever changed. He settled his finger on the rifle’s trigger.

The ranks of acolytes swept aside to let Cojocaru pass. When he passed the last row, the succubus came floating down and landed next to him. She ran her hands over his chest, wrapping her sensuality around her with every liquid movement. Cojocaru ignored her, staring off at something beyond the edges of the scope. She smiled, her slit-eyes flashing, as she drew down the black cords tying his cloak and slipped it off him. As in the photo, he wore a Soviet-era full dress military uniform beneath his cloak—olive-drab service jacket, matching trousers with a red stripe, high black riding boots, shoulder boards with two gold stripes and three silver stars.

Cojocaru walked across the clearing past the bonfires. Waves of power pulsed off Cojocaru, strong enough for Karl to sense even from this far away. The sorcerer must’ve been shielding himself before because there was no missing it now.

He tracked Cojocaru with the crosshairs, leading him as he moved, five minutes of angle lead on a walking man at four hundred meters. He waited for the ideal shot. He wasn’t confident enough in his shooting to risk sniping at a moving target, even from this close. The feeling of wrongness intensified, crystallizing into a hard spiked ball in his chest. Even if he hit with his first shot and killed Cojocaru, how did the Thorn expect him to survive the ensuing firestorm? Bailey believed his followers would fight each other or flee if Cojocaru died, but what assurance did Karl have of that? The Thorn held all its cards close. So how much did he trust them now?

Simple. He didn’t.

Cojocaru lifted his head and scanned the barren mountain peaks. Then, for the briefest second, he seemed to stare straight at Karl through the riflescope. Impossible. A trick of perspective. Cojocaru’s smile was nothing more than a razor slash above his jaw.

“I’m scrapping the mission,” Karl said into the mike.

“What?” Bailey sounded half-choked.

“It’s a suicide mission. It’s over. I’m pulling out.”

“You don’t have that authority!”

“Too much of this is off. Everything’s wrong. They know we’re here.”

“You have a shot. Take it.”

He didn’t answer. He stared through the crosshairs at Cojocaru.

“There’s not going to be another chance like this,” Bailey warned. “Karl, you have to shoot. Think of who you’re doing this for.”

He didn’t answer.

“There’s no second chance,” she said.

Cojocaru said something, his lips moving rapidly. Karl had him in a three-quarter side view, the crosshairs on his neck. If the shot hit high, it would obliterate Cojocaru’s head. If it hit low, it would rip through his rib cage deep into his chest cavity. At this distance he shouldn’t lose very much muzzle velocity to air resistance, and a fifty caliber round would impact with enough force to feed plenty of Cojocaru’s blood to the ground. Karl’s finger settled on the curve of the trigger. He gently put two pounds of pull on the trigger—a pound more and the rifle would fire.

Karl squeezed the trigger.