to his three comrades.
They had quietly skimmed the stone wall surrounding the prison yard. Earlier in the night, a perimeter had been formed by able-bodied soldiers in the blocks surrounding the area, troops badly needed elsewhere holding the streets around this fortress. But now there were no guards left to stop anyone from entering, those who had been on duty having fled inside amid bullets and blades.
Not that it would help them.
This wasn’t a holding cell for the hardened criminal awaiting execution, or even for a pack of murderous madmen. Those incarcerated were guilty only of bowing before a different, Southern power, and they were being held only until the war’s end.
For several seconds, Cole Granger, Cody Fox and Brendan Vincent remained frozen in place, listening. Strange noises, soft cries, sucking sounds, eerie laughter—punctuated by bone-chilling shrieks and screams—issued forth from within the massive brick facade they faced.
“Truly, the situation is only becoming worse by the second, gentlemen,” Cole noted.
Brendan Vincent, veteran of many a battle and even many a war, nodded severely, his handsome and distinguished face set like a rock.
“Yes. Time to move,” Cody agreed. Cody—who knew exactly what they were up against, who had brought Cole into this strange, other battle that had nothing to do with North or South, blue or gray.
“Indeed—now.” Cole couldn’t believe he was saying the words, or that they were entering the main prison, that he was holding his breath and about to go into action against a horde of bizarre demons.
Again.
Hell.
Victory, Texas. Things had been going well there—so damned well that maybe they’d let down their guard a bit. But this wasn’t Victory, and Cole still wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing here, except that he’d seen the results of what was commonly known as “the plague.” It had come to the West, and, back then, Cole hadn’t believed what he now knew to be true. There was one thing that caused the bizarre deaths, the madness, the murder and bloodlust of man tearing apart fellow man and woman.
One thing.
Vampires.
They’d come to his hometown and nearly annihilated the population, his people. They’d massacred almost everyone in Hollow Tree, too. But, thanks to the arrival of Cody Fox, they’d gotten things under control. So, improbably, now here he was, a Texas sheriff, called into the hallowed halls of a beleaguered nation, to help solve a plague again. A Texan, a Rebel, fighting monsters in the heart of the Union.
The key word in his strange situation was actually Texas. Out in the frontier of far west Texas, there were still folks who didn’t even know that a war was taking place. They were too busy trying to feed cattle and sheep or grow subsistence from a lot of dry and rocky land. Most such hardy folk got along with their neighbors, including the Indians, but it was also an area where the different Apache or Comanche clans might go on the warpath. Civil war was something happening far, far away, to someone else.
Cole himself had wanted no part of it. Hard to say who was right and who was wrong when the abolitionist John Brown had flat out murdered slave owners in Kansas, and when the guerilla retaliation had been flat out murder, as well. John Brown had hanged at Harpers Ferry, and Robert E. Lee, sent out to apprehend the man, was now head of the Confederate Army. It was a mess of tangled loyalties all around, and among men who used to be brothers.
It was death. The death of the youth of one country, torn asunder; and it was mothers crying over the loss of their sons, little more than babes, because war always killed the fit, just as it killed the beauty of youth. Confederates were ripping it up as amazing cavalrymen and sharpshooters, naturally, because they mostly lived off the land, while their Northern brethren were simply whopping down hard on the South because they had numbers—numbers of men, numbers of weapons, numbers of financiers, numbers all the damned way around.
So many dead now.
The war was over States’ Rights, and the main right that many of the states wanted had to do with slavery, while half the boys fighting on the Southern side couldn’t afford a good horse, much less a slave. They weren’t really fighting for themselves but someone richer. Always someone richer.
It was a mess to begin with. It was horrible; it was ugly, it was heartbreaking.
Death, horror and bloodshed.
Then throw in a few vampires.
But, then, you could go on forever and not even know about the vampires. Most didn’t. The creatures had to slake a bloodlust, but they worked around the whole killing and draining human being thing by feasting on cattle—just like man himself feasted on beef. Then again, Cole knew a few folks who didn’t eat much meat at all—they lived on the land, consuming mass quantities of vegetables and beans and the like.
There were no vegetarian vampires, he thought wryly. Not that he knew about, anyway, but some were better than others, some had to be.
Cody, for instance. Well, half of Cody.
“Cole, five o’clock!” Cody Fox whispered to him.
He turned; the shadow was just slipping up behind them. He saw it, and quickly assessed his supply of weapons. He wanted to keep it quiet—didn’t want the creature screaming and alerting others.
A stake.
Quick and hard, straight through the heart…his aim needed to be good—
The shadow pounced, becoming substance, the flesh and blood of something that had once been human. It started to snarl, gnashing its teeth, but Cole moved swiftly, his stake honed, his aim true. He rammed the creature through the heart, pinning it to the wooden door marked Warden. Unless it was the leader, an old vampire, it wouldn’t turn to ash. No, this one wouldn’t. It was wearing the tattered remnants of a uniform, butternut and gray—a recent soldier. The fellow had been a prisoner here. Already beaten and bested at war, he was now dying in truth, pinned by the stake. The thing’s eyes widened and seemed to dampen with sorrow; its jaw continued to work. It—he—looked at Cole with a split second of humanity, and there seemed to be gratitude in the eyes.
Cole felt his heart squeeze. The thing twitched and went still.
Brendan stepped forward, a bowie knife in hand. A second later, the head fell to the floor. Brendan jerked the stake from the creature, returning it to Cole with a nod.
Once the rush began, there wouldn’t be time for such thoroughness, neither in the killing nor in the covering up of their deeds. Brendan, a Unionist to the core, could manage the Union authorities and make their actions disappear if need be.
After all, it was Brendan who had gotten them here tonight. Cody Fox, who had come to Victory in a time of need and become a damned good friend. He had been military with Brendan, but Brendan had been in the service his whole life—right up to and into this War of Northern Aggression, as Texans called it. Not that that stopped him from coaxing Cody Fox out to Victory, Texas, to stop the infestation that had killed so many Southerners out there. Nonprejudicial infestation—the damned vampires didn’t care much if you were free, slave, white, black, red, yellow, old, young, man or woman.
The bastards and their plague could certainly get around—here
