Author: Joseph Nassise
Date: 2014-09-02 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Urban Fantasy; Paranormal; Action & Adventure; urban fantasy series; Fantasy; contemporary fantasy
Description: Cade Williams was just an ordinary cop until the night he came face to face with a fallen angel known as the Adversary and nearly died. Now he commands the Echo Team, a special ops squad of modern Templar knights, and the things they hunt are far darker and much deadlier than your average criminals. Cade Williams’ worst nightmare has come true. The Necromancer’s black magick has not only released the Adversary from the infernal realms where Cade imprisoned it, but allowed the fallen angel to possess the body of Cade’s beloved wife, Gabrielle, in the process. When the Templars interrupt the rit
Publisher: Createspace

JUDGMENT DAY

Cade Williams was just an ordinary cop until the night a fallen angel nearly killed him. Now he commands the Echo Team, a special ops squad of modern Templar knights, and the things they hunt are far darker and much deadlier than the criminals that he used to face...

Cade Williams' worst nightmare has come true. The Necromancer's black magick has not only released the Adversary from the infernal realms where Cade imprisoned it, but allowed the fallen angel to possess the body of Cade's beloved wife, Gabrielle, in the process. When the Templars interrupt the ritual and kill the Necromancer, the Adversary sprouts wings and escapes into the darkness.

Branded a traitor by the Templars for his cooperation with the sorcerer, willing or not, Cade finds himself hunted by his former allies as an enemy of the Order while working feverishly to track down the Adversary and rescue his wife from the vile creature's control. It is almost too much for the weary Echo Team commander to handle.

Just when he thinks things can't get any worse, he makes contact with a creature known as the Forsaken One and discovers answers to the questions that have haunted him since the Adversary first appeared in his life. Answers that may ultimately cost him more than he ever imagined.

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WELCOME TO THE ORDER

The book that you are reading is part of the Templar Chronicles series, in which the Templar Knights have been resurrected as a secret combat arm of the Church, charged with defending mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. The series is set in the modern world, where the average Joe is unaware of both the reality of the supernatural world and of the existence of the Order itself, a situation the Templars work diligently to maintain.

At center stage is Knight Commander Cade Williams, a veteran of the Order and a man torn between his thirst for vengeance against the supernatural creature that murdered his wife and his need to discover what happened to him during that same encounter several years before. Cade leads the famed Echo Team, a special forces-style unit that is called in only when the situation has become particularly dire. Echo is the best of the best, there is no doubt about that, but the fact that they are led by a man rumored to have more than a few unusual abilities of his own leave many within the Order more than a little uncomfortable in dealing with them.

The Templar Chronicles Series

The Heretic (Book One)

A Scream of Angels (Book Two)

A Tear in the Sky (Book Three)

Infernal Games (Book Four)

Judgment Day (Book Five)

Fall of Night (Book Six)

JUDGMENT DAY

Joseph Nassise

PROLOGUE

Red Hook Container Terminal, Brooklyn

Two Weeks Ago...

When Cade came back to his senses, he found the ritual had already started. Incense burned in braziers somewhere out of sight behind him, filling the room with their cloying scent, while in front of him the Necromancer’s acolytes were draining the blood from their four victims into large, silver bowls specially prepared for that purpose as they chanted a deep, guttural song in a language Cade didn’t recognize.

His gaze shot across the room to find Gabrielle, his heart skipping a beat when he saw that for the moment she was still unharmed, still herself.

Or, at least, the shell of who she had once been before all this.

The Necromancer stood between them in the center of the ritual circle. His head was bowed and he was chanting something in counterpoint to what his acolytes were saying. The songs hurt Cade’s ears to hear, for they were the kinds of songs not meant for human consumption but fashioned and played in places far darker than the mortal realm.

The Necromancer stepped slightly to one side, revealing what his body had been hiding from Cade’s view. A small wooden table stood there and resting on the table was the Hand, the Staff, and a meat cleaver.

While his brain was still trying to process that last item, the Necromancer reached out and picked it up. His song rose higher, mixing with those of his followers, the entire chorus seeming to rise toward some mysterious denouement. Cade felt something in his ear pop and blood trickled down the side of his face.

The Necromancer laid his left hand flat upon the tabletop. He brought his right hand, the one holding the cleaver, up over his head.

As the song swelled to its climax, the Necromancer shouted out a word of power and brought the cleaver whistling downward. It slashed through his wrist – skin, flesh, muscle, and bone – as if it wasn’t there and embedded itself half-an-inch deep into the wooden surface of the table.

The veins in the Necromancer’s neck stood out like taut wires and Cade thought Logan was going to scream and collapse to the floor in pain, but the sorcerer held himself together long enough to let go of the cleaver and snatch up the Hand. Without hesitation he shoved the base of that shriveled relic against the bleeding stump of his severed wrist.

The moment the Necromancer’s blood touched the mummified skin of the Hand, power flashed across the room in a wave that was almost, but not quite, visible to the eye. Cade felt it as though it slammed him against the pillar with awesome force. Two of the Necromancer’s acolytes were thrown to the ground and Cade thought he heard the unmistakable sound of a neck snapping under the impact. Cade watched in horror as the flesh of the Hand filled out, the skin pushing away from the bones, the blackened, shriveled husk swelling and turning a healthy pink color.

Silence fell.

The laughter began moments later, starting slowly but building in volume and tone until it was echoing around the massive room.

The laughter was coming from the Necromancer and when he thrust his hands into the air in a victory stance, Cade could see that the Hand had grafted to the sorcerer’s wrist completely, as if he had lived with it since the day he had been born. Power literally dripped from its fingers in blackish-green threads of arcane might.

“Behold! The Hand of Glory reborn!” Logan shouted.

There was more than a touch of madness in his voice.

# # #

The Blackhawks set down with military precision and discharged their passengers before climbing back up into the night sky above where they would remain until the extraction order was given. The minute Riley’s feet hit the concrete he forgot about the choppers, confident that the pilots knew their jobs and needing, right now, to concentrate on his own.

The windows of the warehouse ahead of them were lit from within by a strange greenish-black hue and Riley knew that they had found their target.

That was where they would find the Necromancer.

And hopefully Cade.

He charged forward, knowing without needing to look that his men were forming up around him in a classic SWAT formation with overlapping fields of fire that would support and enhance their effectiveness as a strike unit. Five yards to his right another squad was doing the same and Riley had a moment to admire the precision of the team’s operation before figures lurched toward them from the shadows surrounding the building.

It took only seconds for the lead men in each squad to recognize the newcomers for what they were – reanimated corpses fresh from the grave, or, in this case, the sea – and to pass the signal to the rest. Gunfire arced out with brutal efficiency, cutting a swatch through the enemy ranks.

Just as Cade had discovered earlier, however, these creatures were only minimally affected by the bullets that ripped through their rotting forms. A few fell to lucky headshots, but the rest simply regained their feet or continued on undeterred by the gunfire.

In seconds they would be among the knights.

“Swords!” Riley called out over the team’s communications equipment and his men ceased their fire, drew their holy blades, and met the oncoming charge straight on.

Swords flashed, bodies collided, but the precision and unity of the Templars was no match for the restless dead. Riley and his men chopped through the enemy ranks in moments, leaving the field littered with corpses and the path to the warehouse clear of obstruction.

Riley raised his sword and signaled for the squads to form up on him as they converged on the entry point; a tall warehouse door that filled half of the structure’s rear wall that was used to bring the oversized shipping containers into storage. Two men ran forward, placed demolition charges, and ran back. Riley crouched down and turned his back.

The shout came next. ”Fire in the hole!”

# # #

The Necromancer snatched up the Staff of Anubis and power flashed again, surrounding him in a sickly black corona of arcane energy that seemed to shift and dance with a mind of its own.

Without another word to Cade, Simon Logan pointed the Staff of Anubis at Gabrielle and shouted out a long string of words in ancient Sumerian.

Power flashed out from the end of the staff and struck the feather around Gabrielle’s neck, enveloping her in an inky ball of energy so thick that she was momentarily lost from sight as the ground beneath Cade’s feet seemed to shake in response.

# # #

Riley raced in through the breach in the warehouse door, his eyes going wide at the sight of the Necromancer wielding the Staff of Anubis in what looked to be an attack against Cade’s wife, Gabrielle, while Cade himself struggled against the bonds that had him tied to a support pillar nearby. Between the two groups were several of Logan’s personal entourage, who appeared to be involved in some kind of ritual summoning that looked suspiciously familiar to Riley.

He centered the muzzle of his gun on the Necromancer’s back and fired three swift shots.

All three struck home with deadly force, throwing the Necromancer forward and sending the Staff of Anubis tumbling free from his hand. The arcane power flashing about the room snapped off with the suddenness of someone flipping a switch.

Now released from the onslaught of all that energy, Gabrielle’s body sagged against its bonds in the metal frame on the other side of the room. Her head lolled back and forth on her chest for a moment before going still.

Riley rushed over to Cade’s side. Riley could sense the battle winding down around him, the Necromancer’s acolytes surrendering now that their leader was out of the fray, but Riley’s attention was focused now on his friend. He cut through Cade’s bonds with his knife. The Knight Commander tumbled forward and only Riley’s quick hands kept Cade from collapsing to the floor. Riley was helping him try to sit up on his own when a voice cut across the chatter and commotion filling the room.

“Cade? Cade, where am I?”

# # #

Gabrielle!

Cade couldn’t believe what he was hearing and his grip tightened like a vice on Riley’s arm as he muttered, “Up. Help me up.”

He didn’t think he’d spoken loudly enough, but Riley must have heard him because his friend was suddenly helping him to his feet so he could see.

Cade looked across the warehouse floor, across the death and destruction, across the blood and the bodies of the dead, and looked into his wife’s eyes for the first time in seven years.

“What happened?” she asked. ”Why am I in this thing?”

It really was her, he realized.

She was here. Alive.

Whole!

Summoning his strength, Cade replied, “I love you. I’m here. I’ll explain everything.”

Then to Riley, “Leave me. Get her down.”

Cade looked up to reassure her once more and that’s when it happened.

Gabrielle’s body convulsed.

One minute she was looking at him with a sense of deep bewilderment and then her body snapped as if she’d been hit with a bolt of lightning.

For one, long moment she was still with them, afraid and uncertain of what was going on, and then she blinked and convulsed again.

When she opened her eyes a moment later, someone, no, something, had taken up residence there.

It stared across the room at Cade and then it smiled.

That smile promised a hundred horrible things, each one worst than the last.

But that was nothing compared to when she spoke.

“Hello, Cade,” said the Adversary from behind her eyes.

As her husband shouted in horror, “Gabrielle” flexed her arms and legs, snapping the iron frame holding her prisoner like a small twig. She landed in a crouch and as she rose to her feet, great, grey and black molted wings sprouted from her back and spread out behind her with the snap of clothes on the line.

The muzzles of Templar weapons swiveled in her direction and shots began to snap out, peppering the air around her, but she flexed those great wings and launched herself upward, smashing through the roof and disappearing into the night sky high above.

A single black feather drifted down to the floor of the warehouse in the wake of her passing.

CHAPTER ONE

Knight Captain Matthew Riley paced back and forth in the narrow confines of the anteroom outside Preceptor Johannson’s office as he waited to be called inside. He’d just come in from the field and his grey jumpsuit was still stained with the blood of the duergar they’d been hunting not an hour before, but he’d be damned if he stopped to change just to save the sensibilities of the man who he was waiting to see. He’d been summoned to appear “forthwith” and so here he was, bloodstains and all.

Riley didn’t like Johannson - thought the man was a pretentious pain-in-the-ass with a God complex – but he was forced to tolerate him thanks to recent changes in the chain of command that put the Echo Team, never mind the rest of the Templar special operations squads, under the control of the local Preceptors. Previously they’d reported to the Seneschal, the Order’s second in command, but that had all changed in the wake of the recent prison break. Even worse, Echo was based in the same commandery as Johannson, which meant Riley got to see far more of the Preceptor than he card to. If he could have transferred the team somewhere else, anywhere else, he would have done so. Even Australia, under the control of that old pain-in-the-ass Dennison, would have been better than here.

The last two weeks had been sheer hell and not just politically. There had been a seemingly endless stream of disasters, one after another, from the escape of the Necromancer to the reappearance of the Adversary in the resurrected body of Gabrielle Williams, the once-dead wife of Echo’s former commander – and Riley’s closest personal friend – Cade Williams. Echo and the rest of the fast response combat teams had been hunting for the Adversary, and Cade, ever since that night in the warehouse when the fallen angel had broken the barriers between this world and the next and returned, no doubt intent on wreaking as much havoc as was physically possible.

It was Riley’s job to prevent that and, so far, he wasn’t having much luck.

Of course, getting dragged out of the field for bullshit meetings like this one wasn’t helping.

No sooner had he finished the thought that the door to the Preceptor’s office opened behind him. Riley spun around to find Hennessy, the Preceptor’s aide, standing there.

Riley ignored the scathing look the aide gave his attire as he stepped into the office, but made sure to trod on the other man’s foot as he went by. Hennessey was known to be rather fastidious when it came to personal hygiene and it would drive him nuts thinking about all the disgusting things that Riley’s boots could have come in contact with while in the field.

It was petty, Riley knew that, but it made him smile nonetheless.

His smile was short-lived however as he remembered why he’d been summoned here.

The man he’s come to see sat behind his desk, ostensibly reviewing a thick sheaf of paperwork but Riley thought he was just pretending to keep busy. Johannson was the perfect bureaucrat, far happier to be ordering people about behind the scenes than serving on the front lines. Like all Templars he’d spent some time in the ranks, but his penchant for Machiavellian maneuvering in order to build allies with one hand in each other’s pockets allowed him to climb into an executive position relatively quickly and it had been many years since he’d held a weapon. For men like Riley, and Cade before him, that made him next to useless.

As was typical, the Preceptor didn’t bother looking up from the work he was doing but simply ordered his subordinate to report.

“Update me on the search for Williams.”

Riley stared at the Preceptor without saying anything for a moment. He didn’t know what the hell the Preceptor’s problem was with his friend and former commander, but rather than getting better since Cade had “retired”, it had only gotten worse. Johannson was obsessed.

They had a fallen angel running around on the loose somewhere and this fool can’t get his mind off Cade.

When he knew he’d get called for insubordination if he held back one second longer, he finally said, “I’ve been unable to locate the Knight Commander since the night he left the warehouse in Brooklyn.”

The Preceptor’s glanced up lazily, catching Riley in his stare. ”You mean fled the warehouse, don’t you?”

“No, I mean left. He was in pursuit of the Adversary.”

Johannson’ sneered. ”He wasn’t in pursuit of anything, Captain. Williams fled the scene to join his compatriots, leaving you and your men at the mercy of anything else that might have remained in that warehouse. He even ordered you not to fire on that infernal creature he’s collaborating with as he did so!”

Riley knew that Cade had ordered them not to fire at the time for fear of killing the host body that the Adversary was possessing, the body, and possibly the soul, of his long-dead wife Gabrielle, but there was no way he was going to argue the theology and ethics of that one with a man like Johannson. Instead, all he said was, “I don’t see it that way. Sir.”

Johannson threw down the papers he been holding and stared at Riley with disgust. ”You don’t see it that way? No, of course you wouldn’t. Your loyalty to a known criminal is distressing, Captain. If I wasn’t short staffed I’d remove you from command of the Echo Team.”

Go ahead and try, Riley thought. Johannson had almost caused a mutiny after leaving him and Cade out to dry in the midst of the Chiang Shih incursion and the men in the ranks wouldn’t take too kindly if it were to happen again, not while the Adversary was out there somewhere. The men didn’t regard Riley with the same mix of fear and awe that they gave to Cade but that didn’t mean he wasn’t a well-respected commander in his own right. The men would follow Riley, perhaps even more willingly than they would Cade, as they regarded Riley as one of their own.

The Preceptor shook his head, as if in disgust, but Riley didn’t rise to the bait. After a moment, Johannson said, “What news of the Adversary?”

Now, finally, he gets to what’s important.

But Riley didn’t have much better news on this topic either.

“We’ve had reports of several sightings but we’ve been unable to corroborate any of them. Our best bet is that our target has gone to ground, most likely to get used to the physical form it now controls.

“On the plus side, we’ve confirmed the death of Simon Logan and have recovered the Staff of Anubis.”

“So you’re not totally incompetent, is that what you’re telling me?” the Preceptor asked.

Riley wisely kept his mouth shut.

“Any word on who the woman was?”

Riley hesitated, but then decided the truth would serve him better than being evasive. The information was bound to come out at some point and it went a long way to explaining why Cade had acted the way he had.

“The woman was Gabrielle Williams, sir, the Knight Commander’s former wife.”

Johannson stared at him. ”Williams’ wife was killed several years ago.”

Riley nodded. ”That’s correct, sir.”

“Then how...?”

“We don’t know. Her body was there when we arrived and, given what happened, we didn’t have time to investigate further.”

Riley had no qualms about lying about Gabrielle, for he knew that if he told the truth Johannson would bring the Order’s inquisitors down on his head faster than he could blink. He’d helped Cade dig up Gabrielle’s grave, after all. He’d been there when his friend had levered the coffin open and found his wife’s still-warm body lying inside, without the slightest hint of corruption or decay, like a modern day Sleeping Beauty just waiting for her prince to come. Most other Templars would have assumed the body was being sustained by black arts and destroyed it immediately, but Riley hadn’t done anything of the sort. He’d ever helped Cade carry his wife’s body – Riley couldn’t bring himself to call it a corpse – to his vehicle and watched him drive off into the night. After all, it hadn’t been that long before that when Gabrielle herself had rescued Riley and the rest of the Echo Team when they’d been trapped in the Beyond by the angel Baraquel. He’d stared into her eyes and spoken directly to her; if there was even the slightest chance that her soul could be reunited with her body, Riley wasn’t going to be the one to stand in the way.

The Preceptor wasn’t so accommodating.

“Why am I only now hearing about this?”

Riley shrugged. ”I believe it was in my initial report.”

It wasn’t; he knew that. He’d intentionally left the woman’s identity out of it, but he also knew that Johannson wouldn’t remember one way or the other. If the Preceptor checked, and found out differently, then Riley would claim it was a simple oversight.

Johannson glared at him, as if the weight of his stare was going to cause Riley to suddenly break down and give up the truth.

Gonna take a lot more than what you’ve got to get me to break, Riley thought, as he gazed calmly back at the other man.

But then Preceptor surprised him.

“So help me understand this, Captain,” Johannson said. ”That night, at the warehouse, you entered the building and found both Commander Williams and the Necromancer inside together, along with the seemingly intact body of William’s dead wife?”

“Well, yes, but...”

The Preceptor talked right over him. ”And it never occurred to you that the reason this woman’s body was intact after being in the ground for the last five years was because the Necromancer had just used his sorcery to make it so?”

“What? No, it wasn’t...”

“And now both Williams and the Adversary, who, by the way is now using that suddenly intact body we were just talking about, have disappeared and YOU DON’T SEE A LINK BETWEEN THEM?!”

The Preceptor’s face was bright red by the time he had stopped shouting and for a moment Riley wondered if the man was going to have a heart attack. Before he could say anything, however, the Preceptor stabbed the intercom button on his desk and said, “Get me Operations” when his aide replied.

Uh oh, Riley thought.

The phone rang seconds later and Johannson snatched it up.

“Operations? This is Preceptor Johannson. I’m issuing shoot-on-sight orders for both the Adversary and former Knight Commander Cade Williams. Have a written copy prepared and sent to my office for immediate signature.”

Riley spoke up the moment the phone was back in its cradle. ”Sir! You can’t do that. Williams is a respected...”

“Shut up, Captain! That’s an order!” the Preceptor yelled, then slammed his palm on his desk to emphasis the point.

Riley’s mouth closed with a snap.

Into the silence, the Preceptor said, “I don’t know who you think you are, Captain, but don’t you dare presume to come into my office and tell me what I can or cannot do. Is that clear?”

“Sir.”

“Sir what?”

Gritting his teeth, Riley snapped to attention and then replied, “Sir, yes sir!”

“As of this moment both you and Echo are relieved. I’m reassigning Gamma Team to handle the search for Williams and the Adversary. You are to stand down and stay out of the way.”

Five minutes later Riley was headed for the barracks, determined to speak to as many of the men as possible before the alert spread through the ranks. Preceptor’s authorization or not, he intended to make it clear that anyone who used deadly force again Cade was going to have to deal with the Echo Team afterward.

If Cade left them alive, that was.

CHAPTER TWO

The man that was causing such a ruckus amidst the Templar ranks, Cade Williams, was at that moment nearly fifty miles away, standing in the shadows beneath a broken street lamp in New York City watching as a man and a woman walked arm-in-arm toward the entrance to a respectable hotel about three hundred feet ahead.

The man was unimportant; just some random John the woman had picked up not ten minutes before. It was the prostitute that Cade was after.

The woman wore a skintight dress as dark as midnight, which was a sharp contrast to her shoulder-length honey-blond hair, and high heels which helped accentuate her long legs and athletic figure. Both the dress and the shoes were designed to draw the eye of potential customers and to keep them from looking too closely at the rest of the package. If the woman’s make-up was laid on a bit too heavily to hide certain peculiarities on her skin or if her nails were just a bit longer and thicker - more like claws really - than one might normally expect, her new John hadn’t noticed when she’d picked him out of a crowd at the bar she’d been waiting in. Nor had it taken much for her to entice him into joining her back at her hotel for a quick drink before getting into other, more interesting, and certainly more carnal, activities. Cade had noticed both those things though and had been more than a little aware of the entire predatory atmosphere that surrounded her selection of her most recent mark. After all, he understood her true nature. He’d encountered her peripherally during the course of an investigation several months earlier and had been too consumed in his search for his target at the time to give her much thought.

But now times were different.

He’d been watching her for the last two hours, ever since she’d arrived at the bar, waiting for the chance to make his move. When she latched on to her latest victim, he knew his patience was about to pay off in spades.

The hotel was on 125th Street, just past Second Ave, on the edge of Harlem. No one would confuse it with a five-star hotel in the heart of Manhattan, but it was clean and had decent room service, which was more than could be said for many hotels in the same area.

As the pair reached the front door and disappeared inside the hotel, Cade remained where he was, hidden in the shadows. The long, dark coat he wore served two purposes; it would help him blend in with the night while at the same time keeping him warm as he waited. He didn’t want to spook his target into running and he knew that’s precisely what she would do if she spotted him before he was ready to make his move. Better to lull her into a false sense of security. In a few minutes she would be too absorbed in what she was doing to pay attention to much of anything else.

That was when he would act.

The last two weeks had been unimaginably difficult. He’d spent years believing his wife to be dead at the hands of a demon known as the Adversary, only to learn that he’d been terribly, horribly wrong. Gabrielle was not dead at all, but rather was being held prisoner in the heart of the Beyond by the very demon he’d thought had killed her. Cade fought tooth and nail to rescue her from that hell, had even faced the Adversary in hand-to-hand combat, nearly dying in the process. Despite his efforts, he’d fallen short in the end; he had returned from the Beyond with Gabrielle’s physical form but without her soul.

He’d retired from the Order at that point, part of a backroom deal that preserved the career of his executive officer, Matthew Riley, and spared many of those who had followed him into the Beyond to face the Chiang Shih threat against the Preceptor’s orders. Cade had returned to his home, spending his days caring for his catatonic wife while trying to find some way of bringing her back to wholeness.

The Preceptor had tried to reactive Cade in the wake of the Necromancer’s escape from Templar custody, but Cade had refused. His refusal had become moot, however, when Simon Logan had kidnapped his wife and used her as the basis of a ritual that had resulted in the return of the Adversary to this physical plane.

For just a moment, Gabrielle had been there before him, her body and soul reunited. She’d recognized him, had even called his name in those seconds before the Adversary had burst back onto this plane of reality, taking her physical form and claiming it as his own. Cade could only watch in shock as his beloved wife changed before his very eyes and took to the sky on demon wings...

Cade cut a swath through the supernatural community in the days that followed, doing everything he could to track the Adversary. He checked with the Order’s friends and enemies alike, wringing every scrap of information free of their control before discarding them, often broken and battered, in his wake. The Templars could tell where he’d been by the wide path of destruction he left in his wake, but they couldn’t anticipate his next move quickly enough to catch up to him.

Now, two weeks later, he was running out of leads. He could only hope that this one would bear some fruit.

Hold on, Gabrielle, he thought into the night around him. I’m coming.

A glance at his watch told him that enough time had passed; his quarry should be sufficiently involved at this point to not notice his approach. Leaving the shadows behind, he hurried across the street, into the hotel lobby, and past the registration desk to a door marked “Exit”.

He could have taken the elevator, but preferred to use the stairs he found on the other side of that door because the stairs didn’t come with security cameras the way the elevator did. He paused on the landing to the fourteenth floor just long enough to draw his weapon, an HK Mark 23 .45 caliber pistol, and chamber a round, and then stepped through the door into the hallway. A quick glance in either direction assured him it was empty.

He knew from his previous investigation that she’d cut a deal with the hotel’s night manager. In exchange for a cut of her profits, the manager kept a room aside for her assignations. It hadn’t taken too much effort for Cade to dig up that room number and that’s where he was headed now.

Room 1417 was halfway down the hall, right next to ice machine and vending area. Cade had to laugh at the manager’s pragmatism; for once, he wouldn’t have to worry about paying guests complaining about the noise from the ice machine.

Arriving in front of the door, Cade drew a small Rubik’s Cube-looking device out of his pocket, grasped it in both hands, and gave it a sharp twist. A dull whump reached his ears as the magick embedded inside the cube activated, erecting a sound barrier around the entire room. Knowing the creature inside would detect the activation of the ward, Cade didn’t hesitate any longer, just raised one booted foot and slammed it into the door adjacent to the lock.

The door popped open with a crack and he was through it before it even had time to rebound off the inside wall; gun up and pointed at the couple in the bed in front of him.

He’d caught them in flagrante delicto, the woman straddling the man’s hips and rocking up and down while holding his arms against the mattress above his head. The man acted as one would expect; startled at the unexpected intrusion and then frightened when he spotted the armed gunman who was suddenly there in the room with them. He tried to sit up, but the woman refused to let him, holding him down on the bed with the strength of one hand. She, on the other hand, turned her head to glare at Cade as he came through the door, but made no move to stop what she was doing. If anything, she ground her hips down harder with every thrust, staring at him with eyes that gleamed crimson in the light.

“Come to join us, Templar?” she asked, in a harsh, guttural voice that was far from the sweet, dulcet tones she’d used on her mark earlier in the night.

Knowing the creature’s true nature, Cade wasn’t surprised by the sound, but the man beneath her certainly was. He kept glancing back and forth in horror between the woman straddling his body and the man holding the gun, apparently not sure which of them was the greater threat. Cade almost felt sorry for the poor bastard.

Almost.

“Let him up,” Cade said calmly, his gun centered on the succubus demon’s forehead.

“No! He’s mine!”

She kept grinding, up and down, up and down, while beneath her, her would-be victim struggled ineffectually against her hold on him. The man was terrified and while that normally would have been an impediment to sex, the demon’s magick had hold of him and normal rules no longer applied. Cade knew the victim would remain fully erect while the demon quite literally milked the life right out of him. Those that managed to survive such an encounter were never the same afterward.

Cade didn’t care about the john or the ruin the man’s life would become after this; the man had made his bed and now he’d have to sleep in it. All Cade wanted was the information he suspected the demon was carrying in its head and he was willing to do just about anything to get it, including sacrificing the john to the cause if necessary.

But first he’d give it one more try.

“Either let him up or we’re going to see what hollow points filled with holy water do to that lovely form of yours. You have until I count to three. One...”

She snarled and hissed at him, but made no move to get up.

Beneath her, the john began shouting, “Get it off of me! Get it off!”, as his fear overcame his reason. He wasn’t going to last much longer, Cade knew.

Cade said, “Two...”

The demon open its mouth and shrieked, the sound like a thousand babies chewing on glass and screaming at the same time, but Cade didn’t even flinch. He was used to such things and his unique nature kept him from being affected by the fear she was trying to induce. Nor was he worried about anyone else overhearing what was going on inside the room; the ward by the door taking care of all that.

The fact that Cade hadn’t put a bullet through her skull the moment he’d come through the door finally registered with the demon, for Cade could see the expression in her eyes change as she calculated her chances of survival if she gave in to his demands. Prudence apparently finally won out, for she climbed off her victim and shoved him out of bed with the flick of her hand.

The man hit the floor, hard, and Cade quite clearly heard the loud crack as the man’s neck snapped from the angle of the impact.

The demon looked at him in lazy defiance. ”Oops,” she said.

Cade ignored her willful disobedience.

“Tell me where the Adversary is,” he said calmly.

The demon threw back its head and laughed at him, clearly not believing she was in any real danger,

Cade quickly disabused her of that notion by shooting her in the kneecap.

The bullet, blessed by the Holy Father himself, tore through the demon’s flesh, tumbling and breaking apart on impact, spreading the holy water it contained through the wound in its wake. Blood the color of dirty oil splashed across the bedsheets as the bullet fragments tore out of the other side of the creature’s leg, shredding flesh and bone as it went.

This time when the demon screamed, it did so out of pain rather than defiance.

The sound was still echoing around the room when Cade calmly switched targets and put a bullet through the demon’s other leg.

Another howl of agony erupted, this one louder and longer than the last.

As Cade looked on, the shape of the thing before him flickered and changed as the demon was no longer able to maintain its illusion. One moment there was a gorgeous woman kneeling naked in front of him, the next Cade was staring at a hunched creature with leathery skin and spidery limbs that had two small bat-like wings jutting from its back. The joints of its lower limbs had been shattered by the gunshots and the only way it was going to escape now was by crawling.

Still, the demon refused to give in.

It raised its wrinkled, pig-like snout and said, “I’ll not betray the Master to the likes of you, Templar.”

The Master? Hardly.

Cade laughed in response. ”Oh, I think you will,” he said, as he threw off his coat, revealing the sword that hung at his side, the sword fashioned from cold steel and blessed before every combat mission, including this one, the kind of weapon that was anathema to the demon before him.

The sword rang against the scabbard as Cade drew it forth.

He advanced on the injured demon before him, smiling as he did so, but there was nothing pleasant in that smile.

“Oh, I think you will. I think you will tell me everything I want to know before we’re finished, demon.”

The screaming inside that room went on for a very long time.

CHAPTER THREE

Riley was in the ready room of the Ravensgate Commandery cleaning his gear when an initiate burst in, his face flushed with excitement.

“Sir! Commander Williams was just spotted entering a hotel in New York City!”

Riley took the proffered communications report and quickly skimmed it. The hotel was on the border of Harlem, in an area that the police tended to avoid unless there was a significant issue that needed to be addressed. His team should be able to get in and out again without too much trouble.

“I want Echo on the pad in five minutes,” Riley told the initiate. ”Have Delta standing by as back-up. Now move!”

The messenger took off at a run, leaving Riley alone to collect his gear and consider his next move. Gamma might have been given command of the search but that didn’t mean the other teams weren’t authorized to respond in a critical moment. If Riley moved quickly, he could contain what had the potential to turn into a major disaster. Both Echo and Delta teams were made up of veterans who had fought for Cade in the past and as such were far less likely to start a firefight with their former commander. Many of those men owed Cade their very lives and they wouldn’t be so quick to want to turn him over to the Preceptor and his minions as some of the newer soldiers would be.

Riley couldn’t ignore the call, but at least he could stack the deck so that he wasn’t responding with a chopper full of trigger-happy newbies. It was the best he could come up with at short notice.

The room began to fill up as members of both squads arrived to grab their ready bags and head for the chopper. With time being of the essence, they would wait to suit up once they were airborne rather than doing it here. Riley nodded to the veterans, men who he’d fought with repeatedly over the years and come to respect, and he kept his eye on the newcomers. There’d been a time when a man’s acceptance into the Order was all that was needed in order to trust him with your life, but Riley knew those days had somehow slipped past when he wasn’t looking. The Chiang Shih assault had severely depleted the Order’s ranks and in its wake they’d needed to bring up new recruits faster than usual. Men like the Preceptor had seen that as an opportunity to fill the ranks with their hand-picked cronies, men who were perhaps beholden more to an individual than to the Order itself, and that had caused tension among the teams lately that Riley didn’t know how to address. The irony that Echo was being called out to hunt its most effective commander, the man who had put his life on the line to stop the Chiang Shih assault when he’d been told by his superiors to ignore the warning signs, wasn’t lost on Riley either.

Never a dull moment around here, he thought wryly as he grabbed his gear bag and headed for the landing pad.

The commandery in Westport, Connecticut had been Riley’s home for several years and it didn’t take him long to make his way through the halls and to the landing pad behind the manor house. A Blackhawk helicopter was waiting there for him, the rotors already turning. He hurried over and climbed aboard.

The rest of the squad was only moments behind him.

Once airborne, Riley got Command and Control on the radio and asked them to build a cover that would allow them to land the choppers close to the scene with a minimum of fuss. The Templars operated in secret, but they had people placed in key positions throughout many other government agencies and it didn’t take long for Command to get back to him with a plan. Riley and his team would be going in under the guise of a Department of Homeland Security fast response unit holding an unannounced training exercise. They’d be met on the ground by one of their people inside the department who would provide ground transportation and agency credentials that would stand up to short-term scrutiny by both the public and other law enforcement agencies.

It was a good cover and Riley hoped it was a good omen for how the rest of the op would go.

The flight from Westport to New York City took less than fifteen minutes. Their pilot brought them in over the FDR Drive and landed at the 34th Street Heliport, which was normally closed at this hour and it therefore allowed the team to disembark without observation. Their contact was waiting for them there with a pair of armored Suburbans borrowed from the local DHS office to better foster the illusion of their cover. The men pulled on dark blue jackets with DHS emblazoned on their backs in bright yellow letters before boarding the SUVs. Less than a minute after landing the team was headed north on the FDR, sirens and lights clearing the path as they raced ahead, hoping to catch Cade before he left the scene.

Personally, Riley thought he would be long gone by the time they arrived, but the effort still had to be made, if only for appearances sake.

They jumped off the FDR at 120th street and cut across town until they reached 3rd Avenue. From there it was just moments until they raced into the hotel parking lot, slamming to a stop in front of the entrance, the men disembarking and following their commander inside.

Riley was still trying to figure out exactly how he was going to get Cade’s location out of the night manager as he walked in the door, but as it turned out he didn’t have to. The manager came rushing out from behind his desk to greet them as soon as he caught sight of the team entering the building in their armored vests and dark jackets.

“Oh, thank God! You’re finally here!”

Riley had no idea what the man was talking about, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“Give me an update,” he ordered as he headed for the elevator, forcing the manager to walk with him in the process.

“One of our security team was watching the monitors and caught a man exiting the stairwell with a gun in his hand,” the manager said, as he pulled out a key and used it to call the elevator. “The man found the room he was looking for, kicked the door open, and then he disappeared inside. That’s when we called the police.”

Not for the first time, Riley was thankful that the Order made a habit out of monitoring the police band in major cities across the US. Someone in the communications department must have heard the 911 call come over the wire and acted swiftly enough to route the request to the Order rather than to the NYPD for whom it was intended.

“I assume you’ve been monitoring the room since?” Riley asked, as the elevator dinged and the door opened in front of him.

“As best we can via the cameras in the hallway. No one has come in or out since. If you’ll follow me...”

The manager moved to step inside the elevator but Riley put out a hand and stopped him.

“My men and I will take it from here. What’s the room number?”

“1407,” the manager replied, seemingly relieved that he wouldn’t have to go up there. He handed over a plastic passkey. “This is a master key. It will get you into any room in the hotel.”

Riley accepted it with a nod of thanks and then asked, “How many people are registered in the room?”

“Two. A man and a woman. They checked in about fifteen minutes before the man with the gun arrived.”

So Cade had either been trailing them or had been alerted to their arrival by someone else at the hotel. Riley bet it was the former.

“What about the rooms on either side of 1307? Are they occupied?”

The manager shook his head. ”No, we’re not very full this evening and it’s, uh, not a very popular floor.”

Gee, can’t imagine why, Riley thought.

“All right. Fourteenth floor is off-limits to everyone, including your people, until we get this resolved. I will let you know when it is safe to allow access. I don’t want anyone accidentally getting hurt, understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

As the manager hurried back to his station, Riley turned to his men and ordered them into position, sending First and Second squads to cover the stairs at either end of the floor while leaving Third to manage the lobby and taking the Command squad with him up to the 14th floor to handle the actual assault.

Inside the elevator, Riley watched the digital numbers above the elevator doors light up.

5...6...7...

He found himself wondering just who it was that Cade had followed inside and then, on the heels of that, praying that they’d given it to him whatever it was that he wanted. Cade was not the type of man you wanted to hide things from, particularly where his wife was concerned, and right now finding Gabrielle was the only thing that mattered to him.

The only thing.

8...9...10...

Riley pulled open a Velcro pocket on the left side of his vest and removed a small dental mirror. He gave its surface a quick shine.

11...12...13...14.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened.

Riley stuck the toe of his boot into the gap between the doors, holding them open, and then extended the dental mirror just past the opening. He used it to look down the hall in one direction, then in the other.

The hallway was clear.

He slipped the mirror into his pocket. Holding the doors open with one hand, he looked back and nodded at the men behind him. One by one they slipped out of the elevator, with Davis and Simmons taking up position across the hall and Martinez waiting for Riley on the elevator side. Then, as a group, they advanced on their target, weapons at the ready.

As they drew closer, Riley could see that the door to room 14o7 was slightly ajar. He stopped just shy of the entrance, signaling his men to do the same, and then he listened for a moment.

Nothing but silence.

He glanced at each of his men and got three nods in return, signaling their readiness for action. Riley nodded back and then counted down with one raised fist.

One...

Two...

On three Riley rushed forward, shouldering the door open and bursting into the room, the other Templars at his heels.

The smell hit him first, the thick coppery stench of spilled blood unmistakable and nearly overwhelming, and then Riley got his first good look at the room in front of him.

The place resembled a slaughterhouse.

Blood as black as pitch had pooled on the bed and been splashed across three of the room’s four walls. Some of it had even reached the ceiling. Small pieces of flesh – none large enough to be identified as anything specific – were scattered throughout the room. Riley had the sinking feeling that if you added them all up you would end up with a whole corpse, but given the color of the blood he was pretty sure it wouldn’t have been a human one.

A second body, this one of a naked human male, lay on the floor next to the bed. His head was at such an unusual angle that it was clear that his neck had been broken. Riley noted the way the blood that had dripped down from the bed had pooled against the sole of the man’s bare foot and concluded that he’d died before his companion, whoever that had been.

Clearing the room was his number one priority, so Riley didn’t stop to examine either the corpse or the other remains scattered throughout the room but headed straight for the partially open bathroom door instead.

He could see that the light was on inside so he didn’t hesitate, just kicked the door open and followed it inward, swiveling to check the shower stall and the space behind the door.

Both were empty; the room was clear.

“Clear!” he called, and seconds later received an answering call from the main chamber behind him.

Lowering his weapon, he moved to rejoin his men in the other room and only then heard the crunch of glass underfoot and noted what was left of the bathroom mirror strewn over the sink and floor tiles.

Riley had seen a similar tableau too many times not to know what it meant.

Cade had been here. He’d used the Beyond to avoid Riley’s squad and escape the room without being seen. Heaven only knew where he was now.

Damn it, Cade! You’re not making this easy, now are you?

The fact that they’d probably only missed him by moments did nothing to assuage Riley’s frustration. He needed to find Cade before Gamma did or who knew what disaster would result?

With Cade having already fled the scene, there wasn’t much more that Riley could do aside from figuring out what had drawn Cade here in the first place.

He knew that it had something to do with the Adversary, for finding the creature was Cade’s sole focus right now. He would hunt the abomination to the ends of the earth in an effort to rescue his beloved wife, Gabrielle, and Riley knew Cade would be utterly relentless in doing so.

Utterly ruthless, too, if the scene in the other room was any indication. So who, or what, had Cade encountered here that led him to such extremes?

Riley didn’t know.

But he knew if he was going to be of any help to his old friend, he was going to have to figure it out.

Quickly, too.

He stepped back into the main room where his men were waiting.

“Simmons get on the horn and get an evidence collection team in here asap. I want to know who the dead guy is and I want pictures and samples of everything before we turn this place over to the NYPD.”

“Roger that!”

Riley looked at the mess in the room around him and sighed.

It was going to be a long night.

CHAPTER FOUR

“We need to talk,” Dr. Gardner said gently and Debbie Harris felt something break deep inside her at the tone of his voice. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good news; she knew that much before he said another word. She glanced at her son, Henry, lying unmoving in the hospital bed beside her and then followed the doctor out into the hall.

Henry had done two tours in Iraq, driving a heavy truck for the U.S. Army. He’d been ambushed repeatedly, taken a bullet in the shoulder, and even had his vehicle blown right up underneath him by an I.E.D., but in the end he’d come home safe and sound and ready to start a life together with his girlfriend just they’d always wanted.

The irony of it all was almost unbearable. To survive that hell overseas, to come home with body, mind, and soul intact - not an easy thing to do if the other veterans she’d met were any indication - only to be sideswiped by a drunk driver while coming home from the grocery store a week ago. The collision forced his car across the middle lane and directly into the path of an oncoming eighteen wheeler. The truck driver said that it happened so fast that he hadn’t been able to do anything and Debbie believed him. It hadn’t been the truck driver’s fault.

The emergency personnel who’d pulled Henry from the wreck had been amazed that he was still alive, given the two-foot piece of steel embedded in his skull, entering above his left eye and exiting just behind his right ear. They transported him to the ER at St. John’s Hospital where the surgeons had immediately gone to work, removing the steel rod – a piece of the car’s steering mechanism as it turned out – and doing what they could to stop the internal bleeding. It had taken eleven hours to stabilize him, but that had only been the start. Long days of agonized waiting followed; the doctors needed the swelling to come down before they could even begin to assess the amount of damage done to Henry’s brain as a result of the injury.

The results of that assessment must have just come in.

Gardner led her a few steps down the hall to a set of plastic chairs. He took a seat, waited for her to do the same, and then launched into what it was that he’d come to say.

“I’m sorry, Debbie, but the news isn’t good.”

“The results from the CT scan came back and the situation’s even worse than I feared. The rod that punctured Henry’s skull damaged major portions of the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, and the cerebrum. If he were to regain consciousness – and I have to be honest, that’s a big if – he wouldn’t be Henry. At least not the Henry that you knew. The personality centers of his brain, the parts that made Henry Henry, have been irrevocably damaged. He would be an entirely different individual.”

“But at least he’d be alive, right?” Debbie asked, reaching for the slim bit of hope she thought she saw lurking between the doctor’s statements.

Gardner grimaced and shook his head gently. ”Alive, yes, but at what cost, Debbie? His ability to think and reason for himself is gone. You’d be caring for nothing more than an empty shell.”

“What...what would you have me do?”

“With all due respect,” Gardner said, “I would recommend that you turn off the life support devices and let your son die with the dignity he deserves.”

Debbie stared at the doctor in horror. ”Turn off his life support?”

“Yes. It is for the best. Honestly.”

“For the best? Turning off his life support – killing my son – is for the best?”

Debbie could hear her voice growing louder and more shrill as she went on, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Kill her son? He wanted her to kill Henry? Was he insane?

Gardner glanced up and down the hall, then turned back to face her. ”Is there someone I can call to be with you right now?” he asked. ”Someone who can sit with you, help you make the right decision? A husband perhaps?”

Debbie barely refrained from hitting the man. ”My husband died of lung cancer several years ago. It’s just Henry and me. I don’t need help making the right decision. I’ve already made it. We’re NOT turning off his life support!”

“I understand, Mrs. Harris. You want to do what’s right for your son.”

“Damn right I do!”

“Then you should seriously consider what I said.”

To give him credit, Gardner didn’t look away from her when he said it, Debbie thought. At least he had the balls to face her even if he was talking nonsense.

The doctor rose from his seat. ”I’ve got some other patients to look after, so I need to get going. I’ll send up a nurse and perhaps the chaplain to sit with you a bit, all right?”

But Debbie wasn’t listening. She was staring into her son’s room, staring at her son lying there in that hospital bed, and thinking there was no way in God’s creation that she could ever pull the plug on him...

# # #

Two hours later.

Debbie was sitting in a chair in the corner of the hospital room, half-asleep, when a shadow passed across the nearby window.

It took her dozing mind a moment to register that she’d seen something and by the time she pushed herself upright to take a closer look, it was gone. All she was left with was the lingering image of a large, manlike shape with wings.

Wings? Yeah, right.

She shook her head as if to clear it of such a ridiculous notion.

You’re losing it, girl.

She got up and walked over to the edge of the window, where she leaned against the wall next to it and stood peering out into the night. With the lights off in the room behind her, it was easy to see the hospital parking lot spread out below. Of course, the big arc lights set up around the lot’s perimeter helped in that regard as well.

Debbie stared at those lights for a moment, thinking.

A bird must have passed in front of those lights, she thought. The distance probably made the shadow look bigger.

She searched the sky outside, but couldn’t see anything past the arc lights.

If it had been a bird, it was probably long gone by now.

She turned away, shaking her head at her own foolishness, and headed back to her seat.

Behind her, the window exploded inward with a thundering crash.

Debbie screamed and fell to the floor in shocked surprise, as glass was flung in every direction from the impact. The sudden pain she felt in several places told her that she hadn’t escaped unscathed, but a quick check told her that none of her injuries were too serious. The fact that she was off to the side of the window had no doubt shielded her from most of the debris.

Henry!

The realization that her son’s bed was directly in front of the window brought her scrambling to her feet, but when she turned in that direction she received her second shock that night.

A figure stood over Henry’s bed, a figure with large leathery wings that swept out to either side and rose at their tips almost to the ceiling.

Debbie screamed at the sight – she couldn’t help it – and the thing standing over Henry whirled around to face her. In the light from the shattered window Debbie could see that it was a woman in her mid-thirties, with a narrow face framed by chestnut-colored hair dressed in jeans and a tattered t-shirt. She would have been beautiful, possibly exceptionally so, if it wasn’t for the eyes that stared out of that face, eyes as black as pitch with no sclera or pupil. Just the sight of them made Debbie’s blood run cold and she found herself overwhelmed with fear, struggling even to breathe in the face of it. Her body went rigid, unable to move even the slightest muscle, and she could feel panic building up inside her with nowhere to go as the thing stared her down.

The angel, demon, whatever-it-was must have decided she wasn’t any kind of threat for it finally dismissed her, turning back toward Henry. Debbie was relieved to find that she could breathe again when she was no longer faced with that horrifying visage.

That relief was short-lived, however, for in the next moment alarms began blaring from the monitors surrounding Henry’s bed as the intruder ripped the various electrical leads from Henry’s body then yanked the breathing tube out of his throat.

“Hey!” Debbie shouted, all thoughts of her own safety forgotten now that she was faced with threat to her son’s welfare. ”You can’t do that!”

She hurried forward and grabbed the other woman’s arm, intending to pull her away from the bed and prevent her from doing any further harm.

Doing so proved to be a mistake.

Debbie had a second to wonder about the icy coldness and steel-like strength of the woman’s flesh and then she was found herself sailing across the room as the intruder flung her away like an errant insect. She slammed into the far wall with incredible force. The impact shattered several of her ribs, sending their jagged edges lancing through her lungs like razor-sharp pieces of shrapnel. By the time she hit the floor she was bleeding to death internally, but was unable to feel any of her injuries thanks to her severed spine.

Debbie watched as the intruder scooped her son’s body up in her arms and turned toward the window.

“No. Please no,” she begged. ”He’s all I have.”

The other woman didn’t even bother to look in her direction. She took a few steps forward and then, spreading those leathery wings, launched herself out the window with Henry clutched securely in her arms.

“Nooooooooo!”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Another cup of coffee, love?”

Riley looked up to find the waitress hovering over him with a pot of coffee in hand. He smiled, nodded, and held up his mug for her to refill.

“Looks like it’s going to be a beautiful night,” she said while pouring and Riley had to agree. Stamford’s Seaside Diner had been built on the ocean’s edge with the back deck, where he was now seated, jutting out over the waters of Long Island Sound. It gave the two of them a marvelous view of the sunset spreading across the water. The sky was streaked with red and orange, the air crisp and clear, and it was just what Riley needed after yesterday’s events. He’d take the tang of sea water over the stench of blood any day of the week.

The slight chill in the air kept the diner’s other patrons inside and so he had the outer deck to himself. The television mounted in the corner by the door into the restaurant proper was droning on about a comatose Marine who’d been abducted from a hospital in nearby Fairfield, but Riley didn’t pay it much mind; he had enough problems of his own to deal with.

He returned to the commandery around seven that morning and had crashed in one of the ready rooms for a few hours of sleep. Duty called in the early afternoon, but the lead they had turned out to be a dud. Wanting to avoid answering any questions that might arise from Echo’s presence at the hotel the night before, Riley decided to avoid the commandery for the rest of his shift, figuring that “out of sight, out of mind” was best where the Preceptor was concerned. He had his mobile with him in case there was an alert and he could be onsite in less than fifteen minutes, if necessary. As senior commander, he had a bit more leeway in his ability to be away from headquarters than the men in the ranks and he figured now was a good time to exercise that option.

The waitress brought his food and Riley dug into his porterhouse steak with gusto. The day’s efforts in tracking the Adversary had come to naught but he’d worked up an appetite just the same.

He’d barely taken three bites, however, when a tall, lean, dark-haired man with an eye-patch covering his damaged right eye sat down across from him.

“God in heaven, Cade!” Riley exclaimed. ”Are you nuts? You can’t be here!”

His friend glanced around conspiratorially and then leaned toward the table. ”Why?” he asked sotto voce, “Did they suddenly stop serving white people here?”

Riley, who was far from white, didn’t even smile. ”I’m serious, Cade. There’s a ‘shoot on sight’ order out for you! If one of the other knights sees you sitting here...”

Unconcerned, Cade picked up a fork, stabbed a piece of steak and took it off of Riley’s plate. Then, leaning back, he popped it into his mouth. ”Given the size of the mob surrounding us,” he said, “I’ll take my chances.” He chewed contentedly and made no move to get up.

“Stop screwing around and listen to me. Johannson wants your head on a platter and if you’re not careful he’s going to get it. He’s not playing a game; that ‘shoot on sight’ order is serious business!”

Cade waved Riley’s concerns away. ”Johannson’s an idiot and you know it. Nobody from Echo is going to obey that order.”

Riley shook his head. ”It’s not Echo I’m worried about. We’ve been relieved; Gamma is in charge of the hunt for you and the Adversary now. And you know what an asshole that guy Harper is.”

“I can deal with Harper.”

“Cade, I know you don’t...”

The former Echo Team commander slammed his hand down on the table. ”I said I can deal with Harper. Now leave it.”

Riley had been Cade’s friend long enough to know when to push and when not to. Cade had clearly made up his mind. Arguing with him now would be like talking to a rock. Riley decided to let it go.

“Suit yourself. Don’t blame me when you get drilled through the head by some over-eager initiate, though. And stay away from my steak or I’ll stab you with my fork.”

A fleeting grin washed across Cade’s face, there and gone again. Riley was surprised to see even that much. His friend hadn’t been in the best of spirits since they’d returned from their journey into the Beyond and the subsequent events in Brooklyn had sent him into a tailspin.

Speaking of which…

“Want to talk about it?” Riley asked.

Cade signaled the waitress for a cup of coffee, waited for it to arrive, and then glanced across the table at his companion.

“Talk about what?”

“Last night. In Manhattan.”

If Riley hadn’t known him so well he never would have caught the almost imperceptible hesitation as Cade reached for the sugar. But it was there – more fleeting than Cade’s smile – but there, nonetheless.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cade told him.

Riley watched him dump four sugars into his coffee – How the hell does he drink it so sweet? – and then trapped Cade’s gaze with his own.

“Don’t give me that bullshit. You were on candid camera the whole time, or did you forget about hotel security?”

Cade sat back and sipped from his coffee, watching him. Finally, he shrugged.

“I didn’t forget.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Riley said. “So what happened?”

“Nothing happened. I questioned a suspect.”

Riley stared at him. ”Is that what you call it?” he said. ”Questioned? Because to me it looked like you put her – it was a her, right? – through a wood chipper.”

Cade’s jaw tightened and he glanced away. ”Things got a little heated at the end.”

A chill ran up Riley’s back at Cade’s words. His friend had always been ruthless when it came to pursuing the demonic, but tempering that ruthlessness had been a firm sense of right and wrong. Violence had been a tool, yes, but there was always a purpose behind it and Cade had never allowed emotion to govern his use of it. Now it seemed that steadfast control might be slipping a bit.

More than a bit, Riley thought, remembering the state of the hotel room from the night before. In the wake of what had happened to his wife, Cade’s ruthlessness was tending toward cruelty. That worried Riley. Granted, it had only been a demon, but still...

Cade cut into his stream of thought.

“What news of the Adversary?”

The question was asked casually enough, but Riley could hear the raw need in his friend’s voice. This was tearing Cade up from the inside, just as the Necromancer had hoped and planned. It made Riley furious; he wished that they could kill the sonofabitch all over again.

“Nothing. Echo, Charlie, and Delta teams have been assigned to the search full-time for the last two weeks and the Preceptor just added Gamma to the mix, but so far we haven’t found a damn thing. It’s like the bastard just up and vanished.”

Cade’s brow narrowed. ”Come on, somebody has to know something.”

“If they do, they aren’t talking to us. We’ve rousted every friendly I could think of, from the shifter community off of Route 1 to the coven of hedge witches living in that freaky mansion in Westport. Got nowhere.”

“Maybe you’re asking the wrong people,” Cade said.

Riley took that as an oblique reference to Cade’s interrogation the night before. ”Trust me, you aren’t the only one questioning the Adversary’s potential allies. We’ve done more raids in the last two weeks than I can ever remember doing and we’ve still got nothing. The bastard’s fallen off the face of the earth and I suspect we won’t find him until he wants to be found.”

Cade didn’t have to say that it would be too late if they waited for that to happen. They had to hit the Adversary now, before he could bring his plans to fruition or there likely wouldn’t be any stopping him.

Cade opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by the ringing of Riley’s cell phone. The peculiar ringtone told Riley that it wasn’t a casual call; dispatch only used the tone for a unit-wide alert.

Riley snatched his phone from his pocket and answered the call.

“Riley.”

“Operations, Knight Captain. We’ve got a possible SSE sighting and Echo is being tasked with responding.”

SSE was the Order’s code for Suspected Supernatural Entity, one of the more common alerts teams like Echo had to deal with on a regular basis. The dispatch sergeant rattled off an address, which Riley committed to memory.

“Anything else you can tell me?” Riley said into the phone.

“The initial report mentioned seeing a red-haired woman with large, bat-like wings.”

Riley froze. He knew that there were a lot of creatures that fit that description, from harpies to fallen angels, but it was the specific mention of the hair color that caught his attention.

Gabrielle Williams had that color hair. And the last time she’d been seen, she had just sprouted giant, bat-like wings from the center of her back.

He could feel Cade watching him, no doubt wondering what the call was about, but Riley didn’t dare look in his direction for fear of giving the situation away. With the shoot-to-kill order in effect, Cade would be in danger if he tried to make an appearance and that’s exactly what he would do if he knew what Riley was thinking.

“Can’t you get Beta or Delta to deal with it?” he asked, putting a bit of annoyance into his tone.

The dispatcher was caught off-guard by the question and there was a moment of silence while he no doubt tried to come up with a polite way of telling Riley that he was out of his mind; not an easy thing to do when the man you were addressing outranked you.

Then again, Riley thought, non-coms had been doing that very thing with officers ever since war was first invented. It probably wasn’t the first time the sergeant had to answer a stupid question.

Riley didn’t care if it was stupid, as it was all for show anyway. He was simply trying to throw Cade off the scent.

The dispatcher chose the safe route. ”I’m sorry, sir, I’m not sure I heard you properly.”

Good for you, Riley thought.

Aloud he said, “Oh, never mind. We’ll handle it. Riley out,” and hung up before the dispatcher could say anything more.

“What was that all about?” Cade asked, as Riley ended the call.

“Father Corrigan from St. Martha’s called about a boggart infestation. Echo’s next up on the roster so we get the job.”

Boggarts were semi-malevolent household fairies that didn’t like to interact with humans and, as a result, usually kept to themselves. But if you did anything to rile them up, their mischievous nature came out, and they went from harmless little sprites to complete nightmares in the flip of a switch. Annoyed boggarts were known to rearrange furniture, curdle milk and other dairy products, make items disappear and even cause minor accidents like slips and falls. Living in a house full of enraged boggarts was like walking through a mine field; you never knew where and when they were going to strike next!

Riley knew from previous experience that Cade hated boggarts and that he thought using elite strike teams like Echo to deal with them was a waste of time and resources; so it was a safe bet that Cade wouldn’t try to accompany him when he left.

Turns out he was right.

“Better you than me,” Cade said with a look of distaste as he rose from the table. ”Let me know if you hear anything new.”

“Will do.” Riley hesitated, then said, “Take care of yourself, boss.”

Cade gave a wry grin. ”Don’t I always?” he said over his shoulder as he headed for the door.

CHAPTER SIX

Outside in the parking lot, Cade looked around, trying to spot the truck that Riley was using. Only senior commanders and those of higher rank were allowed to own their own vehicles, so Riley had to be driving something from the motor pool. That made the search easy for there couldn’t be that many black SUVs with tinted windows and fake government plates in the parking lot of the diner.

There was only one.

Cade made a mental note of where the Expedition was parked and then hustled over to his own car, a nondescript four-door sedan. He was parked between two larger vehicles a few rows behind and to the left of Riley’s vehicle. He didn’t think his former teammate would be able to see him if he happened to look that way, but Cade wasn’t taking any chances. He leaned the driver’s seat back until he was almost lower than the edge of the dash, leaving him just enough room to see over it. He put the keys in the ignition, but didn’t start the car.

Riley came hustling out the diner’s front door moments later and practically ran for his truck. Cade watched him pull out of the parking lot, then started his own vehicle and followed at a discreet distance.

Sure is in an awful hurry to deal with a bunch of boggarts, Cade thought to himself in amusement. Then again, he could afford to be amused because he’d known Riley was lying the moment he’d mentioned Father Corrigan. Cade had spoken to the man just yesterday and he’d made no mention of having any difficulties of any kind, never mind an infestation of angry little sprites. Riley had been trying to get rid of him, which was a very un-Riley-like thing to do, and Cade wanted to know why.

Cade followed him through town and then north for twenty minutes along state route 7. When Riley turned off onto Huntington Drive, a smaller two lane road with little traffic, Cade hung back, not wanting to give himself away given the scarcity of other vehicles. He let the distance between them widen to a few hundred feet, and as a result almost missed it when Riley turned off the paved road altogether. If the other man hadn’t hit his brakes just as Cade was driving past the entrance to the narrow forest track Riley had turned onto, Cade never would have known where he’d gone.

As it was, the sudden flash of red from the truck’s break lights caught Cade’s eye at the last second. He drove past, not wanting to give himself away, continuing on for another hundred yards or so until he found a place to pull over. Leaving his car by the side of the road, Cade doubled back on foot until he found the place where Riley had turned off.

The road was nothing more than a narrow track through the forest, just barely wide enough to fit a vehicle the size of Riley’s truck. Cade could see lights through the trees a few hundred yards ahead, so he knew his destination wasn’t far. He crept forward, trying to make as little noise as possible.

Ten minutes later he saw the back of Riley’s truck loom out of the shadows ahead of him. He crept forward until he reached the back doors, then hunkered down and peered around the side.

Light was filtering through the trees ahead of them and in its glow Cade could see Riley standing at the front of the truck, talking in low, earnest tones to another Templar who was decked out in full combat gear. When the second man turned slightly, allowing the light to catch him across the face, Cade could see that it was Jimmy Martinez, a veteran member of Echo’s command squad. Cade himself had promoted him in the wake of Sergeant Olsen’s death several months before.

Cade couldn’t hear what was being said, but it was clear that they were prepping for some kind of operation. Martinez stood holding Riley’s helmet and primary weapon, a Mossberg pump-action combat shotgun, while the Echo Team commander finished sealing the Velcro enclosure on the side of the ballistic vest he’d just pulled on, and then passed it over. Riley popped the helmet on his head, chambered a round in the shotgun with a quick jerk of the slide, and then nodded to Martinez to lead the way.

Together they turned and headed for the trees.

Cade gave them a moment and then followed.

# # #

Martinez led Riley to the staging area just inside the tree line near the south side of the bridge. Ten more men awaited them there; the rest of Echo’s command squad as well as the men from squads Three and Four. That brought their full complement to twelve.

Twelve men, Riley thought. Twelve men to take on the Adversary. Should prove to be an interesting evening if they managed to live through it.

He glanced around him. All of the men were wearing standard Templar combat armor that consisted of ballistic vests with chest and back plates made of boron carbide ceramic plates covered with Kevlar fabric, flexible bicep armor, and guards over the elbows and knees. Kevlar helmets and wireless communications rigs completed the get-up. Many were armed with the standard issue Heckler Koch MP5 submachine gun, though a few carried Mossberg combat shotguns like he did. To a man they had their blessed swords strapped diagonally across their backs; knights never went into combat without their swords unless it couldn’t be helped.

In short, they were ready to tango.

Now all they needed was a dance partner.

“Where is it?” Riley asked in a low voice.

“This way,” Martinez replied. He led Riley and the rest of the men a short distance through the woods until they stood at the top of a small rise. Below them, in a narrow gully running perpendicular to their direction of travel was a set of train tracks.

Martinez held a finger to his lips and then began making his way down the slope. Riley followed, moving as quietly as possible. At the bottom, Martinez pointed down the length of the tracks to their left.

Riley looked in that direction.

About fifty feet from where they stood the woods gave way, revealing the swiftly running waters of the Housatonic River and the large, timber-and-iron trestle bridge that spanned them. The bridge was at a slight angle from where they stood so he could see the woman standing on it, just a few yards past the entrance. Even from this distance he could see that she had auburn-colored hair and was wearing a long, dark coat.

Riley never had the pleasure of meeting Gabrielle Williams when she was alive – she’d been “killed” by the Adversary before her husband Cade had entered the Order – but he had encountered her three times in the years since. She had been instrumental in helping him and the rest of Echo escape the Beyond when Cade’s injuries at the hands of the fallen angel Baraquel had stranded them there while investigating the Eden facility. Weeks later Riley had been with Cade when he had unearthed Gabrielle’s body and discovered that she wasn’t truly dead - her body lived on while her spirit was trapped in the Beyond. He’d also been present when the Necromancer had summoned the Adversary to inhabit Gabrielle’s empty, physical form during the ritual at the Brooklyn Container Facility.

He might not have known her personally, but he would bet everything that the woman on the bridge was Gabrielle Williams.

And yet it wasn’t.

Something was...off.

Maybe it was the way she held herself with such perfect, deathlike stillness. Or the icy chill that ran up his spine at the very sight of her. Or the way his animal brain was screaming at him to get the hell out of there, the same way it did every time he encountered something that was higher up the food chain than mere mortals.

Riley knew in that moment that he wasn’t looking at Gabrielle Williams.

He was looking at the Adversary in human form.

He could feel his heart racing as he remembered the last time he’d faced off against this particular foe. Never had he felt more helpless than when the Adversary had taken over control of his body and forced him to fight against Sean Duncan, his friend and fellow Echo Team sergeant. That battle had ended with Riley’s sword shoved through Duncan’s chest and Duncan’s knife embedded in Riley’s throat.

He had been completely at the Adversary’s mercy the whole time and it made him shudder even now just to think about it.

Keep it together, Riley told himself. You’ve faced this bastard before and you can do so again. This time he’s on your turf.

He turned and beckoned Martinez over to him.

“Pass the word that we’re moving up. The men are to hold their fire until I give the word. When I do, it’s weapons free.”

“Understood.”

As Martinez turned to go, Riley reached out and grabbed his arm, stopping him.

“One more thing. Let them know that the thing on the bridge isn’t human. It might look like it, but it’s not. They need to keep that in mind when push comes to shove.”

“Roger that, Captain.”

As Martinez turned to bring the men up to speed, Riley began walking toward the Adversary, determined to put an end to this once and for all.

# # #

Cade crouched amidst the brush at the edge of the train tracks, watching as the Templars moved down the tracks toward the bridge. Riley was already there, standing in the middle of the span, with the gun in his hands pointing at a second figure standing on the railing as if ready to jump off into the waters far below.

Something about that second figure was immediately comforting to him, like the sight of home after a long absence, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on why.

The figure was smaller than Riley, that was easy to see, but he couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman from this far away, never mind who it might be. He was going to have to get closer if he wanted to understand what was going on.

Cade stood, hoping to get a better view of the heads of the men in front of him. A gust of breeze chose that moment to cross the bridge and in doing so it swept a long lock of hair out from behind the figure’s head.

A lock of auburn-colored hair.

The shock of recognition was like a lightning bolt through his brain and Cade was already rushing forward even as the woman reached up to corral her wayward hair and push it back behind her ear with a motion that was intimately familiar to Cade.

The woman on the bridge was his wife, Gabrielle!

Cade’s heavy footfalls alerted the soldiers ahead of him and they spun about, the muzzles of their weapons pointing in his direction as they prepared to fire on the unexpected intruder.

Riley’s shouted order to “Hold!” saved Cade’s life, but Cade barely noticed. He forced his way through the ranks of the Templars until he reached his former squad mate.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Riley asked, grabbing Cade’s arm and pulling him to a halt.

Cade didn’t even look at him – his attention was entirely focused on Gabrielle – as he said, “Don’t you recognize her? That’s my wife.”

Riley shook his head. “No, it’s not.”

But Cade wasn’t listening. He shook himself free of Riley’s grip and took two steps forward, putting him at the vanguard of the Templar formation and only a few yards away from the woman he’d been raising hell trying to find.

“Gabrielle? Can you hear me?”

She turned and looked down at him from her perch on the railing. At first there was nothing in her eyes – no recognition, no feeling – and he thought she was gone for good, but then her vision seemed to clear and he knew that she could see him, that she knew who he was.

Her next words confirmed it.

“Cade?” she asked, in a voice like that of a lost little girl.

Cade wanted to weep with joy. Not only was she here, but she recognized him as well.

“I’m here, Gabbi! Don’t worry; we’re going to help you.”

He didn’t know how she’d managed to free herself from the Adversary or what on earth she was doing standing on a bridge in the middle of the Connecticut woods, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was here and that she recognized him; it proved she was still Gabrielle Williams. After all she’d suffered through, she was still the woman he’d fallen in love with so many years before.

He glanced over at Riley and was surprised to see that his friend was still standing with his weapon at the ready and watching Gabrielle like a hawk.

“Hey,” Cade said, holding up his hands in a “take-it-easy” gesture. “It’s okay. She’s not a threat to anyone.” He turned and faced the other knights. “It’s okay; you can lower your weapons. I’ve got this.”

But Cade couldn’t have been more wrong.

Gabrielle was staring at the men gathered on the bridge in front of her, as if noticing them for the first time. As Cade looked on, a startling transformation swept over her face.

Her gaze lost its softness, growing hard and focused in a matter of seconds. The gentle smoothness of her features disappeared, replaced with harsh lines and angles as they took on a more predatory appearance. Even the color fled from her eyes, leaving nothing but silvery orbs. In seconds, the woman Cade knew was replaced by a total stranger who stared at him as if he were utterly beneath her contempt.

“Help me?” she said, in a voice that swept across the assembled knights like a cold Arctic wind. “What makes you think I need your help?”

Cade knew that voice. He’d first heard it in his own kitchen on a hot summer night when an inhuman killer had come to call and it had haunted his dreams every night since. It might be speaking through his wife’s lips but it did not belong to his wife.

It was the voice of the Adversary.

And in the next moment it attacked.

What Cade had taken to be a long leather coat was suddenly revealed to be a pair of enormous bat-like wings as they sprang open with the sound of a sail sharply unfurling in the wind and the Adversary launched itself into the air directly at the Templars!

Riley threw himself at Cade, knocking him to the ground ahead of him as the demon swept overhead, raking the air where their heads had been seconds before with fingers that morphed into claws even as it struck.

No, no, no! Cade thought as he pushed himself up on his hands, his head swiveling to take in the scene behind him in the wake of the Adversary’s passing; knowing already what he would see but desperately wishing he was wrong.

He opened his mouth to shout, to order the men behind him to hold their fire, but his cry had barely begun before it was drowned out by the roar of more than a dozen submachine guns going off nearly simultaneously as the Templars opened fire.

Cade could only watch in horror as the Adversary seemed to dance and shake in mid-air as two squads of Templar knights hit it with concentrated firepower at the same time. The creature let loose a thunderous roar that literally shook the very framework of the bridge on which they stood as it was blown off course by the simultaneous impact of so many projectiles and disappeared over the side of the bridge.

The former Echo Team commander lurched to his feet and raced to the railing, screaming his wife’s name as he searched the water for any sign of her. Beside him, the Templar soldiers were doing the same, but for a very different reason.

It was too dark to see much and the sound of the water rushing past a hundred feet below covered any sounds their quarry might have been making. Shouts of “Anyone see it?” and “Where did it go?” passed between the men as they searched for it as earnestly as Cade.

Riley stepped up beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “You all right?” he asked.

Cade spun toward him. “You sonofabitch! You knew...”

That was as far as he got.

The Adversary exploded upward from the river below, moving so quickly that those lining the railing barely had time to focus before it was upon them. It had no weapon other than its claws, but they were all it needed as it lashed out at the closest individuals as it rushed past, laying the throats of two men open to the bone before it headed for the nearby trees in an attempt to put something between it and the Templars on the bridge.

Cade’s gaze followed the creature as it raced for safety and found himself mentally cheering it on, knowing it was the only way Gabrielle was going to survive.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Riley bring his weapon up, preparing to fire, and that was more than he could take.

Cade flung himself at his former comrade in arms, knocking the barrel of his weapon downward just as he went to open fire.

“What the hell are you doing?” Riley shouted over the din as he wrenched his weapon free of Cade’s grip and hurriedly tried to line up another shot.

Cade went nuts.

He knocked Riley’s gun aside a second time with one hand while punching him in the face with the other. The blow caught Riley completely by surprise and as his head rocked backwards, Cade swept Riley’s legs out from under him and rode him down to the ground where he began pummeling him with both hands in a fit of white-hot rage.

Riley was the bigger of the two men, but the intensity of Cade’s attack had caught him by surprise and Cade had the upper hand as he kept Riley pinned to the ground. It might have gone on that way for several minutes if some of the other Templars hadn’t seen Riley’s plight and rushed to his aide. Three men tried to drag Cade off of the Echo Team commander, but all they managed to do was earn several blows of their own as Cade successfully fought them off.

Those few moments of respite were all Riley needed, however.

When Cade raised his fists, ready to deliver another series of punishing blows, Riley jabbed him in the side with the Taser he’d managed to pull off his belt.

Cade’s eyes widened as he realized what was about to happen.

Sorry, boss, Riley thought, as he pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER SEVEN

He stood in the midst of a great wood, the massive trees looming around him like ancient sentinels glaring down at an unwelcome intruder. All he could see in every direction were trees, which was disconcerting, for he had no idea where he was or what he was doing there.

Nor did he know how to get out.

The dense foliage and thick branches high above his head kept most of the light out and what filtered down through cast long, lazy shadows between the trees, shadows that seemed to twist and sway of their own accord when he looked in their direction.

A distant voice called his name and he recognized it immediately as that of his wife, Gabrielle. He turned in a slow circle, trying to get a sense of where the call had come from, suddenly knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was in danger and that he had to get to her as quickly as possible; but the sound of her cry bounced off the tree trunks and made it difficult for him to get a fix on her position.

“Gabrielle?”

Again he heard her cry out. ”Here, Cade! I’m here!”

He moved in one direction and then, second-guessing his decision, turned back and moved in the other.

“Keep talking, Gabrielle! Help me find you!”

For a moment he didn’t hear anything and then…

“Hurry, Cade!” she cried, and then something else.

Her voice seemed to be fading, as if she were moving away from him, and he wasn’t certain that he heard her correctly. It had sounded like she’d said, “Open your eyes and see!”

Open his eyes? he thought, frustrated. What on earth was she talking about? His eyes were open!

“Gabrielle!”

This time she didn’t answer.

He shouted again, several times, to no avail.

Cade started to panic. He hurried through the trees in one direction, then turned and moved in another, shouting her name all the while. When he at last stopped to catch his breath, he no longer had any idea what direction to move in.

He was missing something; he knew it.

Open his eyes?

Then, like a bolt of lightning out of a clear summer sky, it came to him.

She hadn’t said open his eyes, but rather open his EYE, as in his third eye, his Sight. Open his Eye and see!

Cade did as he was told. He lifted the eye patch off his damaged right eye, revealing the scarred socket and milky-white eye hidden beneath, a gift from the Adversary in their very first encounter. He stared outward into the trees surrounding him, and, fixing his wife firmly in his thoughts, triggered his Sight.

The first time Cade had faced the Adversary, he’d very nearly been killed and had come away scarred to the core, body and soul. It was only later, while recovering in the hospital, that he’d discovered that the encounter had left him with a some rather unique abilities. His Sight was one of them.

Like shining a light into a darkened room, it allowed him to see reality as it truly was, stripping away the glamours and disguises that the supernatural world typically cloaked itself in and revealing the faces behind the masks. It also let him peer behind the mystical veil that separated the world of the living from the purgatory-like realm he called the Beyond.

Cade didn’t understand how it was going to help him now, but that didn’t matter. Gabrielle had saved him too many times in the past for him not to trust her. She’d been able to communicate with him when her soul had been lost in the Beyond and he expected she could do the same now, despite the fact that the Adversary had laid claim to her physical form.

The moment he made the mental connection that triggered his ability, a lance of light shot forward from the spot on which he stood, piercing the darkness between the tree trunks about fifteen degrees away from the path he’d been following. It hung there in the air a moment, illuminating the way before him, and then faded slowly from view until nothing remained but the afterglow in the corner of his eyes.

Cade had no doubt that if he followed that path, he would find Gabrielle.

He released his Sight, replaced his eyepatch, and then moved out.

A thick fog covered the ground and rose to about mid-calf, making it difficult for Cade to see where to put his feet. Several times he tripped and fell, only to stagger to his feet and continue on his way, and it wasn’t long before his hands and knees were scraped bloody and raw from catching himself on unseen debris.

After what felt like forever, the trees gave way to a wide clearing a good fifty yards across. On the far side rose an enormous oak, larger even than the trees surrounding it, and twice as wide. Great swaths of thorny vines surrounded its base and stretched upward in creeping strands against its trunk. As his gaze followed them, he was shocked to discover his wife pinned against the trunk and held captive high above the ground, her hands and feet secured to the tree with twisting strands of those same cruel thorns.

Cade gasped in surprised horror and, despite the distance between them, Gabrielle opened her eyes at the sound.

She recognized him immediately. ”Help me, Cade,” she said and he heard her as clearly as if she was standing next to him, speaking into his ear. Without thought, without hesitation, he charged across the clearing toward her, determined to find a way to get her down.

The first twenty yards passed without incident.

But as he neared the center of the clearing, his foot caught on something – a rock? a root thrust upward through the soil? – and he stumbled, staggering forward several feet before losing his balance entirely and falling to his knees.

Feeling like an idiot, he tried to get up, only to discover that he could not. His foot was stuck fast, apparently by whatever he’d stumbled over.

“Hurry, Cade,” Gabrielle called.

“I’m coming,” he said, a little impatiently, as he kicked his leg to free it while glancing back to see what he’d caught himself on.

His thrashing parted the fog a moment, allowing him to see.

At first he thought he thought he’d gotten his foot tangled up in a mass of roots, but then they moved and he realized what he’d taken for roots were actually long, narrow fingers that had burst from the soil and wrapped themselves around his ankle. Even as he looked on he could feel them squeezing tighter…

Heart racing, Cade tried to raise his other leg to kick himself loose, only to discover that it, too, had been snared. The fingers were squeezing so tightly that they had sunk into his flesh and he could feel blood running down his leg as they fought for more purchase.

“Let go!” Cade shouted in frustration, kicking his legs to no avail. He tried clawing his way forward, digging his fingers into the earth and pulling with all the might of his upper body and still getting nowhere.

That’s when the ground beneath him started to give way and the hands began to drag him under.

Cade fought like a cornered rat, throwing himself about and scrambling to hold on to whatever was within reach in an effort to tear himself away from the hands holding him, but nothing helped.

Slowly but surely his legs were dragged beneath the surface, until he was buried from the waist down. His legs were going numb from the tightness of the grip on his calves, but he refused to give up.

Gabrielle was screaming his name at this point and yet he didn’t dare take the chance of looking in her direction for fear the distraction would cause him to lose even more ground.

He slipped deeper, nearly up to his armpits, and he could feel dozens more hands grasping at his torso and upper thighs, nails digging into his flesh as they pulled him deeper.

He was still flailing in vain when the hands dragged him under…

Cade lurched awake, the dream receding into the depths of his consciousness like a snake slipping into the night’s shadows.

For a moment he didn’t know where he was or why he was there. Then he realized that he’d been dreaming and the memories of what had really happened came rushing back; images flashing on the Imax screen of his mind with all the grace of an avalanche as he relived seeing his former allies gunning down the woman he loved in an effort to kill the creature that held her captive. He’d lost control at that point, charging forward like some kind of crazed lunatic and attacked anyone he could get his hands on until someone had clubbed him unconscious from behind.

Now, with his eyes open, he found himself in the back of one of the Order’s transport vans as it headed heaven knew where. Twin benches lined either side of the cargo area and he was secured to one of them with handcuffs and belly chains. A glance told him the restraints hadn’t been put on well, for he had at least six inches of slack that he could use to cause trouble if he was so inclined. Sitting across from him on the other bench was a Templar soldier, MP5 in hand. The name tag on his ballistic vest read Dalton.

Upon seeing that Cade was awake, Dalton shifted position, bringing the muzzle of the gun not so subtly in line with Cade’s chest.

“Don’t even think about trying to escape, asshole,” the guard said.

Cade sized him up with a glance and was unimpressed with what he saw. He didn’t know this man; he suspected that he was one of the new recruits brought up through the ranks after the war with the Chiang Shih. That meant he was most likely one of the Preceptor’s cronies.

Which explains the hostility.

With nothing to do but wait until the van reached its destination, most likely the commandery in Westport, Cade decided he’d been pushed as far as he intended to be pushed. It was time to push back, starting with the idiot sitting on the bench across from him.

“Why not?” he said. ”You think you’re up to stopping me if I tried?”

The guard licked his lips and slid his finger inside the trigger guard.

“The Preceptor doesn’t care if you’re dead or alive when you’re brought to justice,” he said with a smug grin, leaning forward to make his point. ”All I have to do is pull this trigger and claim it was an accidental discharge. That would stop you all right. When all is said and done, I’d probably get promoted and you’d be right where the Preceptor wanted you to be. Deader than a piece of roadkill in the Texas sun.”

Cade looked away and said something beneath his breath.

“What was that, asshole?” the guard said, rising to his feet. “You got something to say to me, say it to my face or I’ll beat it out of you.”

Cade let his shoulders roll forward a bit and ducked his chin even lower, as if cowed by the other man’s threat. He mumbled again, keeping his gaze on a certain spot on the floor in front of him.

Dalton took his hands off his weapon and let it fall to his side on its sling. He balled his hands into fists and took a few steps forward, bringing him across the spot that Cade had been watching.

Almost…

The guard leaned down and thrust his face and finger toward Cade.

“Listen to me, you stupid bastard! No one disrespects...”

That was as far as he got.

Cade reared back and then whipped his head forward, slamming the crown of his skull into Dalton’s forehead right about at the point where his eyebrows met. There was a loud smack of impact and the other man’s eyes rolled up in his head and he dropped to the floor, unconscious.

Cade kicked him a few times, just to be certain.

Satisfied that Dalton was down for the count, Cade leaned back against the side of the van to wait for the ride to be over.

It didn’t take long.

After another twenty minutes or so the van began making a series of short, sharp turns that Cade recognized as the roads leading to the entrance to the Ravensgate commandery. They stopped briefly a few moments later – guard booth at the gate, Cade thought – and then continued for another ten minutes before the driver parked the van and turned off the ignition.

Cade heard the front doors open and close, then footsteps approaching the back of the vehicle. When the door opened, he was sitting on his bench, hands out in front of him, and an innocent smile on his face.

Riley and another man he didn’t recognize stared in at him and the unconscious guard at his feet.

“What happened?” Riley asked.

Cade shrugged. ”He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He fell and hit his head when you went around one of those turns a while back.”

The man standing beside Riley sneered and said, “You expect us to believe that?”

Cade laughed. ”I don’t really care what you believe,” he said. ”If you think I’m capable of knocking him unconscious while I’m chained and handcuffed to this bench, more power to me, I guess.”

“Why you smug, little...”

“That’s enough, Brooks!” Riley said, putting out his arm to restrain the other man when he tried to climb into the back of the van.

“But sir! I...”

“I said, that’s enough,” Riley said, in a voice that brooked no further argument. ”I will take the prisoner. You will see to Corporal Dalton, understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

Cade watched as Riley climbed into the back of the van and walked to him. He kept his expression carefully blank as Riley stopped in front of him, his back to the other Templar at the doors of the van, and mouthed the words, “Play along.” Cade nodded almost imperceptibly to show that he understood.

“You’re not going to give me any trouble, are you?” Riley asked aloud.

“No.”

“Good. Keep your cool and we’ll have this sorted out soon enough.”

Riley squatted down in front of Cade to unlock his leg manacles and then did the same with his waist chains. As he got back to his feet, his hand brushed against Cade’s and, in the process, passed him the key to his handcuffs.

“All right, on your feet,” Riley ordered.

Cade did what he was told. As Riley turn to lead the way out of the van, his bulk momentarily hid Cade from view, and Cade used that moment to reach up and wipe the sweat from his face, slipping the key into his mouth in the process.

As Riley helped him down from the back of the vehicle, Cade took a look around. He’d guessed correctly; they were indeed at Ravensgate. Templars milled about, engaged in a variety of pursuits, but nearly all of them stopped to take in the sight of Echo’s current commander leading the infamous Heretic across the parking lot. Cade nodded at those who expressed, via a look or gesture, their solidarity and gave the others the thousand yard stare. He was a bit surprised that the latter outnumbered the former by several factors.

Where had all the veterans gone? he wondered.

By the time he and Riley had crossed to the entrance of the commandery, a small crowd had gathered by the door and more than a few were giving Cade some rather disturbing looks. There was enough anger and frustration on their faces that Cade began to think that they were going to physically attack him, but then Riley spoke up.

“What the heck are you all gawking at?” he snarled at the crowd. ”Never seen a prisoner brought in for questioning before? Get back to work before I put the lot of you on punishment detail for the next two weeks!”

Riley’s command voice was enough to get them to disperse and go on their way, but enough of them looked back for Cade to know that he was going to have trouble if he stayed too long. Riley had told him that the Preceptor was spreading rumors about his supposed allegiance to the Adversary, but Cade never expected his fellow Templars to believe such bullshit.

Apparently, he’d been way off the mark on that one.

Riley led him inside the building, through the checkpoint just beyond the entrance, and down the hall to a set of elevator doors. There were several other people waiting for the lift but they let Riley take the next one that arrived when they saw he was transporting a prisoner. No one, Cade noted, wanted to put themselves in a confined space with him.

The legend of the Heretic strikes again, he thought wryly.

Riley led him inside the elevator car and then punched the button for the second level below ground.

Cade waited until they were on their way down before speaking.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked.

“A squad member reported your presence on the bridge earlier to the Preceptor so I had no choice but to bring you in. Now we have to find a way to get you out of here again before he comes looking for your head.”

“So take off the cuffs and lead me to the door,” Cade said.

“And wind up in the hands of Johannson’s interrogators myself? No thanks. You’ll get your chance to get out of here in a minute. Just be sure you take it when you do.”

Cade could tell Riley was pissed at him. That was okay; he was pissed at Riley in return.

“That was my wife on that bridge.”

Riley turned as if to say something, but the elevator reached its destination at the same moment, the doors swooshing open, and whatever it was, he didn’t say it. There were two sergeants standing outside the car, waiting to board, so Riley simply grabbed Cade by the arm and led him down the hall without another word.

Guards were stationed outside the six interrogation rooms at the end of the hall. They snapped to attention when they saw Riley approaching with Cade in tow.

“I need an interview room,” Riley told them.

“Of course.” The guard casted a curious glance in Cade’s direction, but said nothing as he led the pair over to one of the interview rooms and unlocked the door.

Riley stuck his head inside, nodded to himself, and then led Cade through the door.

The already small room was made smaller by the large metal table that sat in its center, bolted to the floor. Two metal folding chairs were on either side of the table, likewise secured. A metal ring was welded into the table-top in front of one of the chairs, with one side of a pair of handcuffs secured to it. A mirror stretched along the wall opposite the table.

Cade smiled when he saw the mirror.

Riley brought him over to the chair and had him sit down, then secured the handcuffs he was already wearing to the free end of the pair attached to the ring on the tabletop. He tugged on them twice, just to be certain that they were secure, before turning back and heading for the door.

“Let him stew for a bit,” Riley told the guard. ”I’m going to get some coffee and will be back in awhile.”

“Roger that,” the guard said, with a disdainful look in Cade’s direction. ”Stew it is.”

The guard pulled the door shut with a bang and Cade was left alone with only his thoughts for company.

Thoughts of escape, that is.

He had to hand it to Riley; it was actually a very clever move. Riley had left him both the means to get out of his chains as well as the means to get out of the room, all while protecting himself from any recrimination. The guard had watched Riley secure Cade to the table and then they had both left him locked up alone in the room.

Rumors already followed him like the plague so Cade saw no reason not to use his Talent to get himself out from under Templar control. Let them wonder how I did it, he thought. One more mystery for them to solve.

He waited a few minutes, giving time enough for the guards to grow bored of watching him through the one-way glass, and then faked a coughing fit, covering his mouth with one hand and spitting the handcuff key into his palm in the process. He waited again after doing so, just in case the noise had convinced the guards to look in on him through the mirror, and he then grabbed the key with one hand and went to work with it on the locks to the handcuffs.

He was out of them in seconds and had his waist chain and leg irons off moments after that. He kept waiting for the door to slam open and the guards to taser him into immobility, but the hall outside remained quiet and the door firmly closed.

That was perfectly fine with Cade.

He had no intention of using the door anyway.

As he climbed up onto the table in front of him, Cade could hear the sound of running feet coming from the corridor outside the door. He knelt down enough so that he could see through the small window set at eye level in the door.

From outside a guard looked in at him, shocked at finding him free of his restraints.

Cade winked at him.

As the guard began fumbling with his keys and shouting for help, Cade crouched at the edge of the table, took a deep breath, and then dove head first at the mirror on the wall in front of him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

There was an instant of bone-jarring cold combined with the unpleasant sensation of forcing his way through a tangled wall of thick cobwebs and then Cade opened his eyes to find himself in the strange purgatory-like realm he called the Beyond.

Despite all the times he’d been here in the past, he still knew very little about this place. It was a shadowy realm that existed close to the real world in time and space, but forever separated by a wall of energy he’d come to call the Veil. Like the mystical Purgatory, it was inhabited by the shades of the dead, as well as other, darker, twisted creatures that hunted them, roaming the landscape in great, predatory packs. Cade called them spectres and avoided them whenever he could.

The landscape of the Beyond was constantly shifting. Like the image in a funhouse mirror, it could seem hauntingly familiar one moment and infinitely strange the next. Sometimes he would find the place he entered to be a near-identical opposite of the place he’d left in the real world, like a photograph and its negative, and other times they would be starkly different.

This time it was the former.

He found himself standing in an interrogation room much like the one he’d left, except inside this commandery, everything bore a thick patina of decay, as if the basic entropy in all living things had suddenly become visible. The table and chairs were streaked with rust, with patches of metal so brittle in places that it fell apart at the slightest touch. The mirror that had served as his entrance didn’t even exist; the wall behind him displayed nothing more than grime-encrusted brick.

The door to the interrogation room wasn’t locked, so Cade stepped out into the hallway, made his way to the stairwell at the far end - no way was he taking an elevator in the Beyond! - and headed upward. Several times he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye; dim, shadowy forms going about their business around him. He wondered if he was looking at the shades of long-dead knights or the souls of the living back in the real world. Not that it mattered much; as long as they left him alone, he really didn’t care either way.

After reaching the ground floor, he headed for the exit, only to find himself having to turn around and retrace his steps several times as hallways led to places different than the one’s he expected. Cade didn’t let it bother him; he’d dealt with the strangeness of the Beyond often enough to know that surprises often waited around every corner.

When he finally found the front door, he paused on the threshold, taking a moment to survey the way ahead. In the real world, a circular cul-de-sac complete with a large fountain in the center of it, sat at the base of the steps leading to the front door. From there a long drive ran north for several hundred yards to the gatehouse and the main road just beyond. At this time of year the long rolling lawns on either side of the yard would be lush and vibrantly green while the flowers surrounding the fountain would provide frequent splashes of contrasting colors.

Here in the Beyond, the fountain was overgrown with creeping vines the same color as the brackish water, and the lawns resembled scorched earth more than they did lush green swards.

Thankfully, there were no sign of any spectres.

Cade knew his living presence here would attract the spectres like bees to honey. It wasn’t a question of “if” they would get here but rather simply one of “when”. It was almost as if crossing the barrier rang some kind of cosmic dinner bell somewhere, riling the spectres up and pointing them in the right direction. Once they caught your trail, they wouldn’t give up, either, until they’d either taken you down or you’d taken them out.

The last thing Cade wanted right now was a pack of spectres on his heels. For one, he didn’t have any weapons to fight them with. And two, time worked differently here. Minutes could become hours, hours could become days when you made the trip back into the real world. When he and Riley went in search of the Adversary’s hideout on the Isle of Sorrows in the Sea of Lamentations, the week they’d spent in the Beyond had actually been four months back home. The Order had declared them both dead and buried them in absentia; something that Cade knew still freaked Riley out. The longer Cade stayed here in the Beyond, the more time might pass in the real world and the closer the Order might get to tracking down the Adversary, and, by extension, Gabrielle.

He couldn’t afford to let that happen.

Over there, every mirror was a potential pathway to the Beyond, but from this side, the pathways back were far more rare. It was almost as if the two worlds were spinning at different rates and he had to wait for one of the rifts on this side to line up with one of the mirrors on the other. When that happened, a portal appeared and he could cross back over to the other side. Normally, at this point he would have to start wandering about, looking for one of those very portals. But the vision-like dream he’d experienced while being transported to the commandery gave him a different idea.

He descended the steps and crossed the cul-de-sac, giving the choked-off fountain a wide berth in the process. At the edge of the lawn he stopped. He lifted the eyepatch covering his right eye and then put his hands at his side and bowed his head slightly. He kept his good eye open, afraid something would sneak up on him if he didn’t, but mentally called up an image of his home in the forefront of his mind and did his best to focus on that. He pictured the large mirror in the spare bedroom, the one that had belonged to his wife’s mother and which they’d inherited upon her death. It was one of the few mirrors, along with the two smaller ones bolted to the wall in either bathroom, that he hadn’t stripped out of the house during his grief-stricken search of the Beyond months earlier. His wife had loved that old mirror and at the time he just hadn’t been able to find the force of will to make use of it in so cavalier a fashion. Now, however, he needed a target for what he was about to attempt and that mirror was the best option going for him.

He’d just have to remember to explain it all to Gabrielle when she woke up.

With the image of that mirror fixed firmly in his thoughts, Cade crossed his fingers and then triggered his Sight.

# # #

Riley was in the officer’s mess, wasting time with a cup of coffee, when the alarms began blaring through the commandery. As those around him scrambled to their feet, he hid his smile behind another sip of his coffee before getting to his feet to join them.

Men were hustling through the corridors to their duty stations as Riley made his way back to the block of interrogation rooms on the lower level. There he found the men he’d left in charge of Cade frantically searching the nearby rooms. Upon seeing him, they snapped to attention.

“What the devil’s going on here?” he asked.

“Sir! The prisoner has escaped!”

“What?” Riley shouted, glaring furiously at them as he played his part to the hilt. ”You were supposed to keep an eye on him!”

“We did, sir! Honestly!”

“Then how on earth did he escape from a locked interrogation room?”

Riley didn’t wait for an answer but pushed past the guards and headed over to the room where he’d left Cade not twenty minutes before. He knew what he would see - the empty room, the discarded restraints, the cracked mirror - but he pretended to survey it as if for the first time. He looked back at the guard he’d left in charge of Cade and felt the temptation to go easy on the guy; he was an unwitting accomplice to Riley’s own plan to help Cade escape, after all. But Riley knew he couldn’t if he wanted his own involvement to be overlooked.

“What happened?” Riley demanded.

“I marked the prisoner’s arrival in the log as required, sir. Upon returning I glanced into the interrogation room through the observation window and noted the prisoner had removed his restraints. I shouted for help and entered the room in an attempt to subdue the prisoner, but he was gone by the time I got the door open.”

“What do you mean, gone? Prisoners don’t just disappear!”

“He...um, ah…”

“Speak up, corporal.”

“He...ah, jumped through the mirror.”

Play your part, Riley reminded himself.

“Excuse me? He did what?”

Having already stuck his neck out, the guard must have figured it was all or nothing, for he straightened up and said more clearly this time, “He jumped through the mirror, sir.”

Riley stared at him for a long moment before saying, “Have you been drinking, Corporal?”

“No, sir! I swear.”

“One does not simply jump through a mirror, Corporal, not even if you are former Knight Commander Williams.”

The guard grew pale at the mention of Cade’s name and Riley knew the rumors would soon be spreading far and wide. If the rank and file didn’t think that Cade was allied with the enemy before this, those rumors would probably go a long way to convincing them. After all, why else would he have run?

Riley shook his head. Couldn’t be helped, he guessed. Cade had chosen to make the jump into the Beyond directly in front of the guard so there wasn’t much to be done about that now except try a little obfuscation to confuse the issue even more.

“The prisoner must have misled you, fooled you into thinking you were watching him jump through the mirror when he was, in fact, slipping out the door behind you,” Riley said, as he turned away.

“He’s probably still in the building somewhere. If we work quickly to organize the search, we might be able to salvage this mess. Follow me!”

# # #

While Riley was rounding up a search party to scour the commandery looking for Cade, the object of their search was staring in amazement at the brilliant lance of light that shot away from the point where he stood, out across the lawn, and into the distant trees a quarter-mile away.

He had no doubt that following that light would take him to the portal he needed to emerge back into the real world at the point of his choosing - in this case, his own home. It was an exhilarating feeling. All those years, all those trips in and out of the Beyond, and he’d never once thought to use his Sight as a kind of homing beacon for where he wanted to end up. He wanted to shout in excitement, but settled for a fist pump of victory instead.

Cade made note of the path the light blazed across the lawn and the point where it disappeared into the woods. Once he was sure he had it fixed in his memory, he flipped that mental switch deep in the back of his mind that turned off his Sight and the illuminated path disappeared right along with it.

No matter; he knew where he was going now.

No sooner had he dropped his Sight that a piercing howl lifted into the air from somewhere in the distance. It was almost immediately answered by several more and the sound of the pack howling together as one sent chills running up and down Cade’s spine.

He recognized that sound. It was the hunting cry of a pack of corpse hounds.

Cade had encountered them once before, in the battle against the Council of Nine in the swamps of Louisiana. He’d been fully armed and armored at the time and the undead creatures had been dispatched without too much difficulty.

But he was unarmed this time.

And alone.

Time to get moving.

Cade took off running in the direction revealed through his Sight. He had no idea how far away the portal was that he needed to take him where he wanted to go, nor how far back the pack of corpse hounds might be. It was going to be a race to see who reached their target first.

The grass beneath his feet was limp and lifeless, its many shades of grey a sharp contrast to the sea of vibrant green that stretched out in front of the commandery in the real world. Here, too, the lawn was dotted with great, burrow-like holes that led down into the dank earth below and he could smell the stench of the grave as he ran past. Cade didn’t know what lived in those holes and he hoped he never had to find out. The corpse hounds and spectres were bad enough; he didn’t want to know what kind of creature made its home in holes that seemed to even devour the light that spilled across them.

When he reached the trees on the far side of the lawn, some four hundred yards from where he’d started, he glanced back and was just in time to see the first of the corpse hounds charging around the corner of the house.

It was a big beast, half-again the size of a Great Dane. From this distance he couldn’t see the flesh hanging off its rotting frame, but he didn’t need to. He knew it was there; nothing living made its home in the Beyond. He could see the reddish-yellow gleam of the unholy fire that burned in the creatures eye sockets, however, and apparently those strange orbs were good enough to see him as well, for the moment the creature’s head turned in his direction, it issued an ear-splitting cry and came charging across the lawn toward him.

From somewhere behind the house, several other hounds answered their leader’s call.

Cade turned and headed into the woods, running as fast as he could.

The trees were like skeletal creatures, their branches hanging down to the ground as if in search of something to grasp and rend and tear. More than once Cade thought he saw something lurking behind one of the massive trunks, but he dashed past without stopping to look. He’d deal with them if they showed their faces, but for now, he knew that what chased after him was more dangerous than the things watching from the shadows.

As he ran past a bit of deadfall, Cade took a few seconds to snap off a thick branch that he could use as a makeshift weapon. The branch was about three feet long and about as thick around as his wrist, with a jagged spike at one end. It wasn’t much, a makeshift hand spear at best, and his chances of holding off a pack of corpse hounds with it were slim, at best, but it was all he had.

Gonna have to do, he thought and ran on.

The baying of the hounds was louder now, closer, and he knew they were gaining on him. If he didn’t find that portal soon, things were going to get ugly.

To be certain that he was still headed in the right direction, Cade pictured his destination in his mind once again and then triggered his Sight a second time.

Just as before, a brilliant shaft of light shot out before him, lancing through the trees a few feet to his left until, in the distance, it met the glimmering surface of the portal he was searching for.

The hounds couldn’t follow him through the portal. If he could reach it, he would be safe.

Cade dropped his Sight and hurried forward eagerly.

He was only a few yards from the portal when something rushed toward him from his blind side. If it hadn’t been for the snapping of branches as it burst out of the undergrowth, it might have caught him completely by surprise. As it was he barely had time to turn and brace himself for the impact as a corpse hound hurdled toward him like an NFL linebacker intent on sacking the quarterback. It plowed into him, its claws scrabbling for purchase against his body and its jaws snapping shut mere inches from his face as it bowled him over backward.

Those few seconds of warning were enough, however. Cade used the hound’s momentum against it, thrusting it over his head and away from him as he crashed to the ground. Miraculously he didn’t drop the makeshift spear he held and as he rolled over into a kneeling crouch, facing his opponent.

The hound scrambled to its feet even faster than Cade thought possible and was already charging back toward him as he got into position. Cade had just enough time to slam the base of his weapon against the ground behind him and brace himself for impact when the creature leapt forward, jaws snapping and claws extended.

The tip of Cade’s spear caught the beast in the chest and plunged through its rotting body, its own momentum carrying down the length of the shaft until the point burst out its back between the shoulder blades.

For an instant Cade was close enough to stare deep into the creature’s eyes and the hunger and madness he saw there was enough to remind him that this was no place for the living, no place at all. It snapped and snarled in an effort to reach him, but was unable to do so thanks to the piece of tree limb thrust through the center of its body.

Cade knew the other hounds could arrive at any moment, so he didn’t waste any more time. He thrust the spear, and the injured hound impaled on it, away from him and staggered to his feet. He kept his eye on the injured corpse hound as he headed for the portal.

The beast kept trying to get to its feet, desperate to reach him, but the spear jutting out of its chest kept hitting the ground and knocking it off balance. So great was its hunger and drive, however, that it kept trying to get up and come after him no matter how many times it fell over.

As he stepped through the portal, his last sight was of the injured corpse hound, dragging its body forward as it tried to reach him...

CHAPTER NINE

Cade burst through the mirror hanging over the sink in the guest bathroom of his home with a thunderous crash, sending shards of glass flying in every direction. He clipped the sink with his knee as he went tumbling past before landing gracelessly in the middle of the bathroom floor, but that was a small price to pay for arriving intact and in the right place.

After years of traveling the pathways of the Beyond like a dust mote pushed haphazardly by the wind, getting to where he wanted to be when he wanted to be there was a miracle in and of itself. Now that he knew he could travel that way with some degree of accuracy, it opened up near limitless possibilities.

He picked himself up off the floor, shook the glass off of his clothing, and headed for the stairs. Cade was furious – not only at the Order’s attack on Gabrielle the night before but also over their subsequent attempt to lock him up and interrogate him as a enemy collaborator, as if he’d ever ally himself with the sick bastard that had destroyed his life - but his anger was a luxury that he couldn’t indulge right now and he did his best to stuff it back down into the dark recesses of his mind to be dealt with later.

He knew that he didn’t have a lot of time; the Preceptor would send a team here as soon as he discovered that Cade had escaped from the interrogation room. There was no doubt in Cade’s mind that Johannson would see the escape as further evidence that he was colluding with the enemy, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that at the moment. Every Templar would now be gunning for Gabrielle in an effort to take out the thing possessing her and Cade didn’t have time to waste disabusing the Preceptor of his notion that he had gone rogue. He had to find Gabrielle before the others did or everything he had worked for since digging her out of her own grave would be for naught. He didn’t know how he was going to wrest control of Gabrielle’s body back from the Adversary, but one thing was for certain – if his former companions got to her before he did, he’d never have the opportunity to try.

He suspected he still had some allies in the Order – he’d led the special combat teams for quite a few years, after all – but he had no way of knowing just who he could trust and who he couldn’t, which meant all of them were suspect.

Hell, even Riley could no longer be trusted. Sure, he’d helped him back at the commandery, but he’d also ordered the other Templars to fire on Gabrielle.

Of all the betrayals, that one hurt most of all.

Best to just get what he needed and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible before the Templar strike team showed up. That way he wouldn’t have to hurt anybody.

One thing was certain; there was no way he was going to let anyone, not even the Order, stand in his way. He would rescue Gabrielle or die trying.

He hurried down the stairs and into the kitchen. He kept a ready bag in the cabinet by the back door, a habit dating all the way back to his STOP team days. He grabbed it before leaving the house and heading across the yard to his workshop.

The bag contained enough essential gear to keep him going for several days, including a change of clothing, extra cash, two different sets of IDs, extra ammunition for his pistol and his MP5, a personal first aid kit, a tactical radio, a headlamp, and a multi-purpose tool. The contents were oriented toward tactical response rather than a standard bug-out. He wasn’t looking to survive the zombie apocalypse - though in his line of work that particular circumstance wasn’t necessarily out of the question – just go to ground for a few days and lay low.

Hopefully those few days wouldn’t turn out to be a few weeks.

He reached the old barn that he’d converted into a workshop and pushed the door open along its sliding track. Shortly after buying the property, Cade gutted and rebuilt the entire structure, turning the barn’s lower floor into a well-furnished study. What had once been horse stables was now a large, open room with bookshelves lining the walls and several work tables arranged in a semi-circle facing toward the door. A wood-burning stove stood in the far corner, its thick black pipe running up through the floor of the second story high above. An oversized mirror, a good four feet across, had once been bolted to the center of the floor, but that was gone now, victim of a previous mission.

Cade moved straight to the shelves above the center table and took down a long black case with silver clasps. Inside was the sword given to him at his investiture ceremony making him a formal knight of the Order, its blade inscribed on one side with the Latin word for Defender – Defensor – as were all similar Templar weapons. Shortly thereafter Cade had broken Templar custom and had another word etched onto the blade on the reverse side. Ulciscor, Latin for vengeance. The words were like the two opposing sides of his personality and for years he’d walked a fine line balancing between them.

Now, it seemed, it was time to choose.

For Cade, there was no doubt which was the right choice. He would see the Adversary pay for the damage he had caused his family, for the anguish and the pain they’d suffered, for the years of happiness he had stolen from them.

He would have his vengeance.

With go-bag and sword case in hand, Cade was about to turn away when his gaze fell upon the thick, leather-bound journal resting a few inches away on the table top. The journal contained the fruits of his labors over the last five years in researching the Adversary, every little piece of information painstakingly double-checked and verified. It was perhaps the largest collection of information on fallen angels outside of the Vatican archives and in certain hands could be decidedly dangerous.

He scooped it up and dropped it into his go-bag, not wanting to leave it lying around where anyone might find it.

With that, he was finished.

Cade turned and made his way back out of the barn, rolling the sliding doors closed behind him. He thought about chaining them shut, but then decided against it. He wanted to keep the Order’s strike team here as long as possible; every second they wasted would be one more he could use to get farther away.

He ran around the side of the house to where he kept his back-up vehicle. Stripping off the tarp that covered it, he exposed a beat-up old Jeep CJ that looked like it wouldn’t make it a mile down the road. The exterior was deceiving, though. He’d stripped out the original 4.2 liter engine and replaced it with a V8 from a Ford 150 pickup truck, giving it the horsepower he needed, both on the highway and off-road.

Nor was that the only improvement he’d made. He added the usual off-road amenities – a three inch lift over 33 inch tires, a custom front bumper that doubled as a ramming plow, and full-strength winch mounted just behind it – but he’d also created a hidden storage space for his weapons by ripping out the rear seat and putting in a false floor six inches above the actual one.

He didn’t bother properly stowing everything at the moment, just tossed his bag into the passenger seat and climbed inside the vehicle after it. The keys were hanging from the ignition and all he needed to do was give them a twist. The engine started without hesitation, the throaty growl that issued forth from under the hood assuring him that everything was okay.

Cade put the Jeep in drive and was about to head down the driveway when he saw lights coming toward him through the trees east of his property. He counted three, no four, separate vehicles. Whoever they were, they weren’t messing around.

Time to go, he thought.

Rather than head for the street and be forced into a confrontation with whoever was in the approaching vehicles, Cade drove across the front lawn to the other side of the house. A narrow dirt track, just wide enough to fit the Jeep, ran through the woods at the edge of the yard and he headed down it as quickly as he dared in the darkness, not wanting to turn on the headlights and give away his position. The road ran in a straight line for the first few hundred yards so he was able to navigate it with only the occasional scrape of the undergrowth on each side. When he came to the first turn, he made his way around the curve and then brought the vehicle to a halt.

Cade dug his pistol out of his go-bag, dropped a full magazine into it, and then got out of the Jeep, walking a few yards along the road in the direction he’d come.

On the other side of the curve he stopped and stood in the middle of the road, watching and listening.

No lights were approaching nor did he hear the sound of engines in the night air. In fact, aside from a few vague shouts coming through the woods from the direction of his house, he didn’t hear any signs of pursuit. Apparently, they hadn’t seen him.

Cade nodded to himself in approval. One last thing to do...

Returning to the Jeep he opened up the console between the seats and withdrew a disposable, prepaid cell phone. He dialed a number from memory and waited.

The phone rang once...twice...and then was answered.

“Riley.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Cade asked. He was suddenly, deeply, pissed. All the anger he’d been holding onto since the assault on the bridge came welling up at the sound of his former teammate’s voice and it was all he could do to keep himself from raging at his friend.

Or ex-friend.

He wasn’t exactly sure which it was at this point.

“What am I doing?” Riley asked. ”What are you doing? Have you totally lost your mind? You’re interference could have gotten someone killed.”

“My interference saved someone from being killed, you mean. That was my wife you were shooting at!”

Cade realized he was shouting and made an effort to calm himself down. He’d gotten away from the house without being seen; it wouldn’t do to give away his position now.

Riley was silent a moment, and then said, “No matter what you think, that wasn’t your wife. Not anymore.”

Cade shook his head, oblivious to the fact that Riley couldn’t see it. ”No, you’re wrong. That WAS my wife.”

“Her body, yes, but that’s all.”

But Cade refused to believe that. He had gone through too much, suffered too long, fought too hard to just walk away. While there was a chance, no matter how slim, he would chase after it.

“You heard her on the bridge, Riley. She called my name!”

“Something called you, I’ll give you that. But I doubt very much it was your wife.”

Cade had had enough; he didn’t have time to argue. ”Believe whatever you want,” he said, “but understand this. I intend to rescue Gabrielle and I won’t let you or anyone else get in my way.”

Riley was not easily intimidated. ”Think about it for a minute, man! We’re talking about the Adversary. You can’t possibly expect us to just sit back and let him carry out whatever fucked-up plan he has in mind while you get your act together. Innocent people will die!”

For the first time since the conversation started, Cade agreed with his former teammate. He just didn’t care. ”Yes, they will. But innocent people die all the time and in the end it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“It doesn’t matter?” Riley replied, clearly incredulous at what he was hearing. ”Have you gone nuts? Of course it matters. Protecting the innocent is the entire reason the Order exists!”

A year ago Cade would have agreed with him. But the death of Preceptor Michaels had started a slow slide away from that focus as certain individuals began to assert their will on the way the Order was run, directing it not for the good of the people but for their own selfish ends, and now Cade no longer believed that the Order followed that original mandate. What he’d experienced earlier that very evening reinforced that opinion and told him that things were going to get much worse before they got better.

If they got better at all.

It was time he looked out for his own.

“Tell the Preceptor to back off,” Cade said. ”I will deal with the Adversary. If any harm comes to Gabrielle – if even a single hair on her head is damaged from something the Order decided to do from this point forward – then those responsible will have to deal with me!”

“Be reasonable! You can’t...”

Cade pressed the ‘End Call’ button and cut Riley off in mid-sentence. He powered the phone off, then dropped it to the ground and crushed it beneath the heel of his boot. Replacing the phone was much easier than taking the chance that the Order was tracking him through the phone’s connection to the cellular network he’d been using. He scooped up the pieces and flung them into the woods.

He glanced back down the road in the direction of his home a final time, as if to say goodbye, and then climbed back into the Jeep and drove off.

Time was running out and he had a fallen angel to find.

CHAPTER TEN

Once out of the woods and back on more regularly travelled roads, Cade drove north, through Hartford and across the state line into Massachusetts. He grabbed some fast food at a rest stop outside of Springfield, then drove into the outskirts of the city where he found a motel and took a room around the back, out of view of the street.

He’d had time to think about his next move on the drive north. He’d pretty much exhausted his local targets before running afoul of the Order; the succubus he’d interrogated the other night had been the last one on his list. With nowhere else to turn, he thought it was time to try something a bit more extreme.

It was time to look in the Archives.

Officially established in 1475, though they had existed for quite some time before that, the Archivum Secretum Vaticaun, or Secret Vatican Archives, was an extension of the Vatican library that preserved and enhanced the deeds and documents related to the government of the Catholic Church, including the papers of the individual Popes. Its five miles of shelving housed some one million volumes written between the 8th and the 21st centuries. It was the Church’s official stance that the word “secret” did not mean unknown or hidden away, but rather referred to the fact that the collection was the Pope’s personal property.

Conspiracy theorists believed that there was far more to the secret archives than the Church was letting on. In their view the Church was hiding information that would shake the very foundations of society if it was ever released to the public. What that information might actually be changed depending on who you were talking to; theories ranged from proof that Christ had been merely human to a secret tome that would bring about the events chronicled in the Book of Revelation if it was ever read aloud, among others. Most also believed that the archives held a wide variety of mystical relics, from the Holy Grail to the Ark of the Covenant.

Why else would the Church restrict access to all but four people, the conspiracists would often ask, if they contained only simple documents related to the day-to-day management of the Church?

As head of the Templar’s special combat teams, Cade knew the truth. The archives did contain information that would throw the world into turmoil, but it had nothing to do with Christianity. No, the archives contained the truth about the reality of the supernatural world; the truth about how humankind was surrounded by creatures that saw humans as something to be toyed with, or, even worse, fed upon. If that wasn’t bad enough, the information contained therein made it clear that not only were such creatures stronger and faster than the average human being, but that they were often far harder to kill as well.

The Church believed that such information would frighten Joe Public out of their minds and had worked dutifully for many years to keep that information out of the hands of the average man on the street. Even the very name was designed to be misleading; the Vatican Secret Archives weren’t in the Vatican at all, but miles away on the other side of the English Channel at the Templar’s headquarters in Rosslyn, Scotland. More than a little subterfuge was carried out to safeguard the true archives; a portion of the library in Rome was kept locked and under twenty-four hour guard, access to its contents was severely restricted, and certain rumors were carefully leaked at appropriate times. All of this theater was nothing more than that, theater; a large-scale feat of misdirection that kept the public occupied with trying to break the secret of the archives. A secret that didn’t really exist except in their own heads.

It was a marvelous piece of social engineering and Cade had to give them credit for not only coming up with it in the first place, but being able to maintain it in this age of smart phones, Instagram, and the Internet. The Order had an entire division dedicated to just monitoring the various forms of social media, making sure to discredit any actual photographs or video that got uploaded by either flooding the net with similar, though obviously faked, footage or disparaging the reputation of those who did the uploading in the first place.

Cade had long suspected that the Archives held information about the Adversary that hadn’t been made available to the Order’s regular rank and file. He’d gone so far as to request access to that information several times over the years, but his requests had always been denied. No such files existed, was the standard answer. Nor had he ever been able to search for them himself, as the few times he’d been within the archives he had always been in the company of the custodian. With his own personal resources exhausted and without being any closer to finding the Adversary than when he’d started, he thought it was about time to take a look for himself.

He knew he could make the drive to either Hartford or Boston and from there catch a flight overseas, but that would take more time than he wanted to give up at the moment. Thankfully he now had another option. He could get to the Archives, and back again, without having to fly anywhere.

Cade walked into the bathroom where he found a fair-sized mirror held to the wall with four small, plastic mounts. He used the tip of his knife to unscrew the mounts and then took the mirror, frame and all, back into the main room and put it on the floor in front of the bed.

He knew he was pushing things by travelling through the Beyond again so soon after his last trip. Passing through the Veil was both mentally and spiritually taxing and the time spent on the other side, chronologically out of whack with the real world, took a physical toll on one’s body as well. He’d been in a hurry to get his gear and get out of the house after his unorthodox arrival and so he hadn’t felt the effects of his most recent journey into the Beyond until he’d been on the road a bit. Now, a couple of hours later, he felt tired and out-of-sorts and he knew it was only going to get worst after this trip.

Still, what other choice did he have? He needed to get to the Archives quickly and he needed to do it in a way that kept him off the Order’s radar, at least until he had what he needed. Besides, entering the Archives by way of the Beyond helped him avoid not only the guards outside but the locks on the entrance doors as well. It really was the best option available.

Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, that nagging little voice in the back of his mind said to him, but Cade brushed it off.

The time for debate was over; now it was time for action.

He slipped his arms through the straps of his go-bag and hefted it onto his back and then picked up his sword. The weight of the bag would slow him down a little, but he’d have to make due. He had no idea if he was coming back the same way and he didn’t want to lose what little equipment he had at his disposal by leaving it behind. The Jeep would probably be towed if his trip took too long, but at least it would be safe at the local lock-up, not sitting around the lot waiting to be broken into.

Cade took one last look around the room to make sure that he hadn’t left anything behind and then, satisfied that he had not, he stepped up beside the mirror he’d placed on the floor beside the bed.

He wanted to spend as little time finding the proper path as possible once he was across the barrier, so he began preparing himself for that process now. He stood there a moment, head bowed, clearing his mind of extraneous thoughts. When he was ready he began picturing the oversized dressing mirror he’d seen in the Archives the last time he’d been inside. It was the kind of thing he’d expect to find in the bedroom of a guy like the Edgar Allen Poe or the Marque de Sade, with its thick pewter frame covered with finely sculpted figures of witches and demons and devils, all caught up in acts that would make a back alley prostitute blush. Cade didn’t know where the mirror had come from or what it was doing in the Archives, but he was fairly confident that it was still there. Once an object ended up in the clutches of the custodians, it would take something like the apocalypse to get it out again.

That mirror was going to be his backdoor into one of the most protected vault’s known to man.

When he had the image firmly fixed in his mind, when he could practically see every detail well enough to just reach out and touch it, he took a step forward and disappeared through the surface of the mirror.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Colin Ferguson stared at the red light blinking on the screen of the security monitor next to his desk. In all the years he’d served as the Templar’s Seneschal, he’d never seen this particular alert. Nor had he ever really expected to.

And yet there it was.

He rose from where he’d been sitting by the fire, reading, and walked over to his desk. He tapped the glass surface and waited a moment for the touch-screen keyboard to appear. When it had, he tapped in a series of commands, querying the security system to be certain he remembered correctly what that symbol signified.

He had.

Someone was in the Archives.

He frowned; he didn’t remember giving anyone access to the vault this evening. Or any evening, for that matter. The archives were off limits to all but a few, select individuals and only he and the Grand Master were allowed inside after the sun went down.

As the Templar’s Seneschal, it was Ferguson’s duty to manage the day-to-day running of the Order, leaving the Grand Master free to deal with only those issues of the highest importance. He was in charge of managing the seven Preceptors as well as the headquarters commandery here in Rosslyn. One of his most important duties was maintaining the safety and integrity of the archives.

He cancelled the alert with a flick of his finger and settled into the chair in front of his desk. He entered a handful of commands and suddenly the screen in front of him split into six smaller windows, each one displaying a different section of the archives, as seen by the security cameras mounted in the walls.

Five of the screens showed nothing unusual.

On the sixth, a man in dark clothing with a duffel bag slung across his back and a sheathed sword in one hand was just stepping over to the bookshelf that lined one of the room’s four walls. The man’s back was to him, but something about him seemed familiar to the Seneschal.

Ferguson tapped in a few more commands, activating the camera directly in front of the intruder and zooming in on the man’s face.

The scars and eye-patch would have been a dead giveaway to the man’s identity if Ferguson hadn’t already recognized the former Echo Team commander.

Ferguson felt his heart kick into high gear at the sight.

He’d been following the events surrounding the Adversary with great care for many years and was well aware of the recent incident involving the Necromancer, Simon Logan, and the body of Cade’s wife, Gabrielle. If Cade was here, that meant he hadn’t yet given up hope of rescuing his wife.

The Seneschal smiled at the thought.

The end game begins at last.

He watched as Williams approached the wall of books and began methodically examining the titles on their spines, no doubt searching for something that would shed some light on the situation at hand. Given the number of volumes, and Williams’ lack of familiarity with the way the archives were arranged, it was going to take him days to get through them all. Ferguson had to admire the dogged determination the man showed by his efforts. He wasn’t giving up without a fight, that was for sure.

Ferguson watched Cade for a few minutes and then made up his mind.

It was time Williams got a little help.

The Seneschal leaned forward and got to work. Fingers tapping lightly on the virtual keyboard, he began moving through a series of screens, each one more complex than the last. Ferguson had a reputation for being less than savvy with modern electronics, so those who worked around him on a regular basis would have been surprised at the adroitness with which he navigated through the system menus, shutting down various subroutines and changing the trigger calls on others, essentially rewriting on the fly the entire security system that monitored the archives in a matter of moments. The alert notification was scrubbed. The minute of video that showed Williams bursting through the mirror from the inside was replaced with a loop of tape from earlier in the night, making it seem like the archives were not only empty at this very moment but that they had been that way all evening.

Ferguson rolled back the tapes and watched them for a moment, making certain that his tinkering wasn’t readily visible. Satisfied, he set the loop to run indefinitely and then shut down his connection to the system.

With a little luck, no one would ever be the wiser.

Getting up from his chair, Ferguson crossed the room to where a small, cast-iron safe sat on the floor. The safe was used for storing confidential files or dangerous artifacts while they were being used by the Seneschal and couldn’t be returned to either the subterranean vaults beneath the commandery or the very archives Williams was now searching, as the case might be. Ferguson knew that Williams wasn’t going to find what he needed in the archives and with good reason. The volume that would provide him some of the answers he was seeking wasn’t in the archive at all, but right there in the Seneschal’s safe.

He reached inside and withdrew a slim, leather-bound journal whose cover was stained with time and cracked by age. He stared at it a moment, remembering the sacrifices that had been made to obtain the information recorded within, then, shaking his head at his own sentimentality, shut the door of the safe with a quiet click. Getting up, he headed for the door, the volume clasped securely in one hand.

It was time to give the Heretic the information he was looking for.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“The Grand Master will see you now.”

He damn well better, Preceptor Johannson thought as he rose from the seat he’d patiently been sitting in since arriving at Rosslyn Castle some two hours prior. He was mightily tempted to voice his opinion aloud, but he knew how to play the game and getting visibly annoyed at the Grand Master’s little power play would cause him to lose points in the grand scheme of things. That was something he simply would not tolerate.

Johansson had been enroute to Scotland for the annual meeting of the seven Preceptors – one Preceptor for each continent - who ran the day-to-day operations of the Templar Order when word of the Heretic’s escape reached him. It took him a good fifteen minutes to get his rage under control, but by the time he had a plan had presented itself. He’d decided to use his time at headquarters to present his case against Williams to the Grand Master himself. As head of the Order, the Grand Master could do things that a “lowly” Preceptor could not, provided certain truths were in evidence. Johansson intended to use those powers to his direct benefit. By the time he was finished, not only would Williams be branded a traitor and an official enemy of the Order, but he would also be excommunicated and cast out of the faith, if things went the way he wanted.

Once the sentence had been pronounced on the Heretic, he could be hunted like the rabid dog that he was, Johannson knew. No one would dare argue with the need to do so, for everyone knew you couldn’t let an animal like that run around free, not if you didn’t want it infecting everyone it came into contact with. Swift and decisive action was what was called for in such situations.

Once the Heretic was eliminated, I can get on with what I came here to do, he thought with satisfaction.

As the Grand Master’s aide led him down the hall toward the senior official’s private meeting room, Johannson mentally reviewed what he knew of the man.

Antoine Devereaux had been in command of the Templar Order for the last twenty-five years. He was Parisian by birth and had, in fact, risen to prominence during the ghoul incursion of the early eighties, when he’d led strike after strike down into the catacombs beneath the French capital to root out the foul creatures. His notoriety had brought him to the attention of the former Grand Master, who had taken him under his wing and groomed him to be his successor.

Johannson liked Devereaux, not only for his gruff, no-nonsense approach to the Order’s ongoing mission, which Johannson was fully in agreement with, but also for his unrelenting war on all things supernatural. The man was determined to rid the world of anything that wasn’t human and Johannson was more than happy to assist him in the process. So far Cade Williams had managed to escape the Grand Master’s attention thanks to his relationship with the Seneschal, but the Preceptor was confident that things would change once the full breadth and scope of Williams’ treason was put on display for the Grand Master to see.

And he knew he was just the man to do it.

When they reached the end of the hall, the aide opened the door and ushered Johannson into a small study. A desk said to have been made from the bones of giant demon fought around the time of the Second Crusade stood on the other side of the room and behind it, in a high-backed wooden chair that was austere enough to match his personality, sat Grand Master Devereaux.

Devereaux was a hard-looking man in his mid-fifties, with a scar across his throat from where a ghoul’s claws had come a little too close for comfort several decades before. He kept his head shaved and had a tattoo of a Celtic cross on either forearm. He was no longer in the top physical condition he’d once been, with a slight paunch visible beneath his shirt, but at six-foot-two he could still be dangerous in a fight.

He glanced up from the paperwork he was examining when Johannson entered the room, gestured at the pair of similar chairs arranged in front of the desk, and then went back to his reading.

Johannson took a seat and patiently waited until the Grand Master had read through the document, whatever it was, scratched his name across the bottom with a pen, and then set it aside.

At last, Devereaux looked up and gave Johannson his undivided attention.

“My apologies for keeping you waiting so long, Preceptor. It’s been a busy evening and, as you can see, I still have a lot to do. What can I help you with?”

The Preceptor smiled graciously, while inside all he wanted to do was ring the smug “I’m-too-busy-for-this” attitude out of the man.

“It’s no problem, Master Devereaux. The news I bear is distressing, however, and I wonder if perhaps another time might be better to discuss it?”

Devereaux frowned. “Distressing? How so?”

Johannson glanced down, as if ashamed of what he had to say. In truth, it was to hide the smile that crossed his face; if the Grand Master could be led so easily, this should take long at all. For some reason, he’d thought the man to be cleverer than that.

Johannson took a deep breath, pretended to hesitate, and then said, “I’m sorry to say that I believe one of our senior commanders has gone rogue and is cooperating with the enemy.”

That got the man’s attention, just as he’d hoped!

Devereaux leaned forward. “I’m listening,” he said. “I hope I don’t have to remind you of the seriousness of the accusation you’re making. I trust you’ve done your due diligence before coming here?”

“Yes, Master Devereaux. I wouldn’t bother you with this unless I was certain.”

At that point Johannson began laying out his case against Cade Williams, step-by-step, from the night the Dorchester Demon, really the Adversary in disguise, attacked Cade and his wife in their home outside of Boston, to the latest confrontation on the Housatonic River bridge, where Cade had struck several members of his old strike team in an effort to keep them from firing on the creature possessing his dead wife’s body.

He made sure to describe Knight Commander Williams’ regular insubordination toward legitimate command authority, his blasphemous act in unearthing his wife’s body, and the ritual that had been used to put the Adversary’s spirit into the empty shell that had once been Gabrielle Williams.

By the time he was finished he thought he’d stated his case pretty damn well and apparently the Grand Master thought so too, for the man’s expression had gone from weary disinterest to outright alarm at all that he’d heard.

“Where is Commander Williams now?”

Johannson shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? You just said that your men took him into custody after the incident on the bridge!”

It was exactly the question the Preceptor had been hoping for and he used the opportunity to play his trump card and seal Williams’ fate. “They did. Williams was arrested and brought back to the commandery for questioning, just as I said. Unfortunately, while waiting for a trained interrogator to arrive, he used witchcraft to escape from the interrogation room.”

“Witchcraft!” Ferguson exclaimed, spitting the word from his mouth as if the very saying of it was distasteful.

Johannson nodded. “Yes, sir. He apparently, ah, stepped through the surface of the two-way mirror.”

Devereaux stared at him without saying anything for a long moment.

“Stepped through the mirror?” he finally asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, where did he go then?”

“I have no idea, sir.”

Johannson noted curiously that the Grand Master’s face was starting to grow red with pent-up emotion.

“And the Adversary? Where is that thing?”

“We’re not certain, sir.”

Devereaux got up from his seat. “Let me see if I have this straight. A senior commander of our most prestigious combat unit appears to be cooperating with a creature that we have, quite literally, been hunting for decades and we’re not sure where either of them are?”

“I’ve had Echo and Gamma hunting the Adversary for several weeks, but they’ve gotten nowhere. Now, with Williams to track down as well, I’m afraid I’m a bit shorthanded.” Johannson sat back with a shrug. “They could be anywhere, frankly. If we want to catch him, I need the authority to track him down wherever he may be, regardless of preceptorship boundaries.”

Johannson was betting that a proactive suggestion to deal with the crisis was just what the Grand Master wanted to hear and he was right. No sooner had he finished speaking that Devereaux was calling for his aide.

“Brooks!”

The door opened almost instantly and the aide, Brooks, stepped inside, tablet in hand. “Sir?”

“Take this down.”

Johannson listened with satisfaction as Devereaux dictated an executive command authorizing the Preceptor to use any means necessary to apprehend and capture Williams and the Adversary. Just as he’d hoped, Williams was temporarily excommunicated and forbidden to exercise his rights and privileges as a member of the Order until such time as his guilt or innocent could be determined by the high council. Even better, the order extended to each of the seven preceptorships worldwide and granted Johannson the ability to requisition any and all supplies he might need to achieve his ends.

It was all he could have wanted and more.

Devereaux finished dictating and turned toward him. “You were right to bring this to my attention, Johannson. I’ve been saying for years that corruption from within is our biggest threat and now you’ve shown this to be true. In order to keep our mission pure, we need to watch diligently for those who have fallen from the path and help them find the truth once more.”

Johannson nodded in agreement and then asked, “But what if they do not want to see the truth? What then?”

The Grand Master didn’t flinch. “We are the shepherds of humanity, tasked by the Holy Father himself to protect the flock from threats and enemies. Sometimes, if a member of the flock becomes injured or sick, it must be culled from the herd, to protect the greater good. Wouldn’t you agree, Preceptor?”

Johannson nodded.

He did indeed.

.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Cade stood staring at the wall of books in front of him, wondering just how in hell he was going to find what he needed. Most of the volumes in front of him were written in languages other than English; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit and German being the most common. This wasn’t an insurmountable problem – he’d taught himself Latin as well as ancient Greek and Hebrew over the years in his search for the Adversary and knew a smattering of German – but identifying which volumes contained information relevant to his cause was turning out to be rather difficult.

When he’d emerged from the Beyond, he’d found himself on the floor of the storeroom that housed the mirror he’d used as his focus, just as he’d expected. Tall metal shelves holding a wide variety of objects filled much of the room, but as curious as he was about what some of them, he forced himself to turn away and head to the door. His time here was limited and he just couldn’t afford to waste any of it.

The door to the storeroom was locked from the outside, but Cade had been expecting that. He put his ear against the wood and listened for a moment, trying to figure out if anyone was in the hallway beyond or not. Breaking out of a locked room right in front of the custodians probably wouldn’t be a good idea.

Thankfully, he didn’t hear anything.

Drawing his sword, he put the point between the door and the jamb right about at the spot where the lock would be and then threw his weight against it. The blade slid forward, popping the lock.

Exiting the room, Cade moved down a short hallway, passing several similarly locked storerooms in the process, until he came to the main viewing area.

This section of the archives looked like the library in a private gentlemen’s club from another era; bookshelves lined the walls while leather chairs and reading tables occupied the center of the room. An annex jutted off from the main room and through its door Cade could see free-standing shelves filled with ancient scrolls. The overhead lights were out, but the smaller lights inset into the baseboards around the room provided enough light for Cade to see by. He guessed there had to be a couple thousand books on the shelves in front of him alone.

He’d been quite pleased to find the room empty.

Now he stood before the wall of books, trying to figure out the best way of approaching what he’d come here to do. Since the sections weren’t labeled, there was no way to tell what was in a particular volume without taking it down and examining it. Given all the different languages that the books were written in, this wouldn’t be a quick or easy task. Never mind that this kind of approach didn’t take into account that many volumes covered a wide variety of topics that might not be easily be discernible with a quick glance.

Without the help of one of the custodians – men whose job it was to know exactly what was in each volume and where particular volumes might be stored – it was going to take him all night to find what he wanted, Cade thought.

Hell, it might take all week.

It didn’t matter. The information he needed was here somewhere; he knew it. It was just a matter of finding it and there was only one way of doing that.

He slipped the duffle bag off his back and leaned his sword against the wall, within easy reach if he needed it. He began
scanning the titles on the shelves in front of him, taking down the books that he thought might hold information on the Adversary or fallen angels in general and stacking them up on a nearby table as he worked. He’d been at it for nearly twenty minutes, and had accumulated a small pile of books to review more closely when a voice spoke out of the shadows behind him.

“Once again, you surprise me with your cleverness.”

Cade grabbed his sword and spun around.

The man standing on the other side of the room was in his mid-seventies, though he looked two decades younger, thanks to the extreme state of physical fitness at which he kept himself. His white hair was cropped close to his skull in a military-style crew cut and his blue eyes shone with amusement as they took in the sight of Cade standing there where he wasn’t supposed to be.

Cade’s grip tightened on the hilt of his weapon but he didn’t draw it. “I surprise you? Why’s that?” he asked.

“Preceptor Johannson has essentially put a price on your head, young man, and yet here you are, in the heart of your enemy’s stronghold. I must say it’s about the last place I would think to look for you, hence, very clever.”

Cade ignored the backhanded compliment and focused instead on the first part of the Seneschal’s statement.

“Is that what we are now, sir? Enemies?”

To his surprise, Ferguson laughed.

“Good heavens, son. Of course not. We’ve known each other too long, been through too much, for us to ever be enemies. Don’t you know that?”

Cade had hoped as much, but he was done assuming those in command would do what was right. So far, his experience had been exactly the opposite.

For years now, Cade had reported directly to Ferguson in his role as head of all the Templar special-action combat teams. He liked the man for his blunt honesty; if Ferguson had something to say to you, he said it, man to man, right to your face so that you always knew where you stood. It had been Ferguson who had backed Cade’s initiation into the Order when others had tried to claim he was tainted by what the Adversary had done to him so many years before, and Ferguson again who had tried to broker a deal to keep Cade on active duty when the Preceptors had banded together in the wake of the war with the Chiang Shih and demanded his resignation. Aside from Riley, the Seneschal was probably Cade’s staunchest ally within the Order.

Still, Cade found himself oddly uneasy at the other’s presence. Had the events of the last few weeks changed so much that he couldn’t trust even his closest allies?

“And yet you called this my “enemy’s stronghold,” which suggests that while you may not be one of them, I do, indeed, have enemies here.”

Ferguson’s gaze remained steady as he said, “Of course you do. You’ve known that since the day you came to us. I’m not telling you anything new. Or did you think that your nickname was one of affection?”

Cade couldn’t help but smile at that. The old man had a point. The Heretic wasn’t an appellation to be proud of when you belonged to a group of religious warriors. Relaxing at last, Cade put his sword down on the table in front of him and watched as the other man approached.

Ferguson wasn’t done, however.

“It isn’t what you know that is the problem, Cade. It’s what you don’t that will get you into trouble.”

The former Echo Team stiffened. It seemed the other shoe he’d been waiting on was about to drop...

“Things have been...kept from you, is the best way of putting it, I guess.”

“What things?” Cade said sharply, and then, realizing how he sounded, told himself to calm down. He’d always suspected the Order wasn’t telling him everything there was to know about the Adversary and there was no sense in biting the head off the messenger when someone was finally willing to do so.

“Information.”

“About the Adversary?”

Ferguson nodded. “Yes.

Cade thought about that for a moment. “Why are you telling me now?” he asked finally.

For the first time since entering the room the Seneschal seemed hesitant. “In my view events have reached a critical juncture. Delaying any longer could result in consequences that would be too terrible to fathom.”

Cade didn’t miss Ferguson’s choice of wording. “In your view? That would suggest there are others who disagree.”

The Seneschal shrugged. “A question of methods more than anything else, really.”

There was more to it than that, Cade guessed, but the clock was ticking and he didn’t want to be here any longer than necessary. If the Seneschal had the information he needed, regardless of how he came by it or what others thought of it, he’d be a fool not to use it.

“So what do you have to tell me?” Cade asked.

Ferguson shook his head. “I can’t tell you anything. I am bound by an oath not to discuss certain information with anyone outside the senior council.”

But even as he spoke he was taking the journal out from under his arm and placing it atop the stack of books that Cade had piled on the table. Ferguson tapped the cover once, gently, with two fingers, as if to be certain that Cade understood what he wanted him to do, and then took his hand away. Without pause he continued, saying, “I’m sure a clever man like yourself will be able to find the information you need in a library of this size.”

Cade stared at that thin little journal for a moment and then looked up at Ferguson and nodded, not trusting himself to speak. The answers he had been looking for since the night the serial killer known as the Dorchester Demon invaded his home were within reach at last and it felt more than a bit surreal. And if that information gave him a way to save Gabrielle...

A new line of thought occurred to him.

“Would the information kept here have saved my wife?” he asked.

The Seneschal’s response was swift, as if he’d been waiting for that very question.

“Originally, no. The Order had lost track of the Adversary for many years before it surfaced inside that wretched little killer in Boston.”

“And now?”

“If you’d been aware of certain information prior to your confrontation on the Isle of Sorrows you might have chosen to do things differently. Then again, you might not have. The future is never crystal clear.”

There were a lot of things Cade could have said to that, but he didn’t say any of them, choosing instead to remain silent. That was answer enough. There would be time for a reckoning later if events required it. For now, though, he just wanted to see what that book contained.

The Seneschal no doubt recognized his eagerness, for he nodded and turned away. He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps, though, before stopping and looking back.

“One more thing,” he said.

Cade looked up, his hand on the journal.

“Your, shall we say, unorthodox entrance allowed you to slip past the wards surrounding the archives, but you won’t be able to go out again the same way,” the Seneschal said. “When you leave the archives, take a left at the first hallway junction you come to. There is a room about halfway down the hall that has a large mirror in it. You might want to start there.”

“I suspect it would be much easier if you just led me to the front door,” Cade replied, only half-joking.

But Ferguson shook his head. “You know I can’t do that. Until this whole mess with the Adversary is cleaned up, I need to maintain my distance for the good of the Order.”

Cade wasn’t surprised. “We may not be enemies but then again we’re not exactly friends either, is that it?”

An expression crossed the Seneschal’s face, there and gone again before Cade could fully recognize it, but if he’d had to guess he would have said it was...grief.

The Seneschal’s next words seem to confirm it.

“Trust me, son, no friend of yours would willing send you where I am. Godspeed.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cade waited until the Seneschal left the room before snatching the journal up and opening it; the man’s cryptic last words quickly forgotten as he flipped through the pages of the book.

The book had been compiled over time and was quite old, if the date on the first page – 1579 – was correct and Cade had no reason to believe otherwise. It had also been written by several different individuals, if the varying handwriting styles were any indication. The words The Forsaken One kept jumping out of the text at him and Cade wondered if that was some kind of oblique reference to the Adversary.

Only one way to find out, he thought. Flipping back to the first page, he began reading.

What he found within those pages was so fascinating that within moments he was lost in the text.

The journal was a compendium of all the information gathered throughout the years on a creature-being-person (he wasn’t quite sure which and the text never said) known as The Forsaken One. This being, for lack of a better descriptor, was first encountered by the Order in Venice in 1579 by Sir Malcom Trent, who noted that while he was observing a battle between “a heavenly angel and a spawn of the pit” he happened to glimpse a third individual, “covered with writhing markings that appeared like serpents of venom,” observing the battle from the other side of the conflict. When he attempted to approach, the individual swiftly departed the scene.

The same creature showed itself to members of the Order at various times throughout the course of the next 400 years, usually during times of war of global turmoil. The journal made it clear that the being, nicknamed the Forsaken One, never become directly involved in any of the events, regardless of how terrible they might be, but merely watched them unfold instead. It was theorized that its mission was to observe, but for who or what reason no one knew.

Several attempts had been made to take the watcher captive, the most recent during a mission in Cambodia near the end of 1975. All had failed. Most of the time the watcher simply evaded capture, but the last attempt had ended with all six Beta Team operatives killed, their heads removed and mailed back to Rosslyn Castle with a message in Latin that suggested that in the future, the Knights mind their own business and keep to themselves.

The incident must have been hushed up immediately, for Cade had never heard of it during his time as Echo Team commander and he thought he knew the history of the Templar strike teams going back nearly a century or more.

All in all, the story made for some fascinating reading. There was just one problem. Cade didn’t have any idea what the hell it had to do with the Adversary.

Why had Ferguson left it for him?

One thing he’d learned about the Seneschal over the years was that he didn’t do anything without good reason. Ferguson knew that Cade was searching for a way to rescue his wife and to eliminate the Adversary. He’d all but said as much earlier. Ferguson wouldn’t have given him the journal if it didn’t have some bearing on the situation.

So what was he missing?

There wasn’t much in the volume after the Cambodia mission. The Grand Master at the time, a man named Brunelli, had been more lenient toward non-threatening supernatural species than either his successor or the current head of the Order. Brunelli had seen no point in further endangering his men, not with how little they knew about the creature or its abilities. He’d ordered that henceforth the Forsaken One would be left to its own devices and the Templars would have nothing further to do with it. All information about the creature had been stripped from the Order’s computers, with just the handwritten record of their previous interactions kept in the Archives for posterity’s sake.

The same record that Cade was looking at now.

So what? What did it matter? This thing certainly wasn’t the Adversary in disguise. Why did the Ferguson want him to read it?

Frustrated with his lack of understanding, Cade was seriously considering tracking down the Seneschal and asking him straight-up what this was all about when he turned to the very last page in the journal. It was blank except for a series of fourteen numbers written in pencil.

453819123311.

Cade recognized the handwriting as belonging to the Seneschal.

What the hell?

He stared at the string of numbers, his thoughts humming.

Clearly this was what Ferguson had wanted him to find. But what did they mean? Right now all it looked like was a random string of numbers.

Perhaps it’s a code, Cade thought.

Every knight was trained in the use of substitution codes and other, basic cryptograms in case they had to send messages in the open where they might be intercepted by others. Of course that would mean that any other Templar who found the message would be able to decode it as well. Maybe it would only make sense to Cade once it was decoded.

He grabbed a pencil from his go-bag and attacked the code. He tried using each number as a substitution for a letter of the alphabet, based on its position, with A being one and Z being 26. That got him nowhere; the resulting message was just a pile of gibberish. He tried reversing the substitution, making A twenty-six and Z one, but didn’t come up with anything useful that way either.

When that didn’t work, he tried breaking the numbers into sets of three, with the first number representing the page of the journal in which he’d found the code, the second number the sentence counting down from the top, and the third number standing in for the word in that sentence counting from the left.

Thankfully the row of numbers was short and it only took him a few moments to flip back and forth to complete the task.

Unfortunately, that only gave him more nonsense.

He tried pairing the numbers differently. Working backwards instead of forwards. Taking the first, third, and fifth number as a set, then the second, fourth, and sixth number and so on. Dividing them in half, taking the second half and moving it in front of the first, and then trying again from the start.

He tried every method of reworking the code that he could think of and all he got for his efforts was a growing headache.

Cade was on the verge of throwing the journal across the room in frustration when the Seneschal’s parting comment floated across the surface of his mind.

“No friend of yours would willingly send you were I am.”

He went still, thoughts whirling.

Looked down at the numbers.

453819123311.

Would willingly send you where…

“You are the world’s biggest idiot,” he said aloud into the empty room.

Taking his pencil, he put a comma after the seventh number in the sequence, effectively splitting them into two sets of seven numbers each. Then he put a period after the second number in each set, leaving him with two decimal numbers to the fourth place.

45.3819 and 12.3311

It wasn’t a substitution code at all.

It was a set of GPS coordinates.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A hand shook his shoulder and a voice said, “Sir? Wake up, sir.”

Johannson tried to ignore it, tucking his head down and rolling away from the noise.

“Sir? Sir!”

Groggily, Johannson said, “What?”

The hand wouldn’t stop shaking him. “You need to get up, sir. Commander Williams is here in Rosslyn, sir.”

That was probably the last thing Johannson expected to hear and the resulting shot of adrenaline pushed him a good way toward full wakefulness.

“What? Here? Williams is here?” he asked, as he threw off the blankets and sat up. He put his feet on the floor and let the cold stone banish the last of the fog from his thoughts as he focused his attention on the younger man who’d shaken him awake.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee reached his nostrils and he turned to find a cup waiting for him on the nightstand. He picked it up gratefully and took a sip.

“Talk to me,” he ordered.

“One of the custodians spotted Commander Williams doing research in the Archives about twenty minutes ago. Williams never looked up or acknowledged his presence in any way, so the custodian doesn’t believe he was seen.”

Johannson gulped down the coffee, letting the hot beverage do its trick. When he had finished the cup he put it aside and stood up, reaching for his nearby clothes.

“Is Williams still in the Archives?” he asked while dressing.

His aide nodded. “I believe so. No one has come in or out since the custodian, though I don’t know how Williams got inside in the first place.”

This was his chance, Johannson thought. With the newly executed order from the Grand Master, he could seize Williams with total impunity. No one would dare to raise an outcry, not even that idiot Riley. Once he had Williams in his control, he could bring in the Inquisition to get the answers they needed out of him.

It was time to play hardball.

He turned to his aide. “Get a squad of knights up here immediately, but don’t tell them what they’re wanted for; I’ll do that myself. Be sure they’re armed with non-lethal containment weapons as well as their usual firearms. Once you’ve done that, I want you to go down to the lower level and prep one of the solitary confinement cells for us to hold him in. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now go!”

As his aide hurried off, Johannson stepped out of his room into the hall. A member of his protection detail was waiting there for him, as usual. This morning it was a wiry fellow by the name of Dent, who was always itching for a good fight. Johannson found that to be a particularly good omen, for there was no doubt in his mind that Williams was going to put up a struggle when they came for him. They would take him in the end – the Preceptor knew that – but he was pleased to know that he had with him someone who would be more than willing to wade into the fray if it came to that.

“Morning, Dent. Ready for some action?”

The protection officer smiled. “Always, sir.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

With a smug smile, Johansson headed down the hall, his man in tow.

# # #

GPS coordinates.

Cade didn’t know whether to laugh or punch himself. It seemed so obvious now that he knew what the line of numbers represented.

So let’s think this through, shall we?

The Forsaken One had been observing the battle between good and evil for centuries. He’d apparently been taking notes along the way. It didn’t take too much imagination to realize that the intelligence he’d accumulated about both sides of the conflict must be truly substantial.

Given the nature of the Adversary, Cade had to believe that the two had encountered each other at some point over the last couple of centuries. And if they had, it meant that the Forsaken One had information on the Adversary, information that could potentially help Cade rescue his wife.

He felt his heartbeat quickening.

The Order had lost track of the Forsaken One, but apparently the Seneschal had not. The GPS coordinates had to be for the Forsaken One’s location; Cade couldn’t see any other reason for the Seneschal to add them to the journal.

It was a long shot, he knew that. The Forsaken One might not be there any longer. He might not have any information that would be of use to Cade. Or he could simply decide not to speak to him and if that happened, there was little that Cade could do given the other’s more powerful nature. But long shot or not, something deep inside insisted that he follow up on it. The Seneschal was pointing him in this direction for a reason and he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t think there was something there that could help Cade on his quest.

Which brought him to the big question.

Where did those GPS coordinates lead?

The thick stone walls of the Rosslyn commandery were notorious for blocking cell phones and other electronic signals, so Cade knew he couldn’t just look it up on his phone. He was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

Both numbers were positive, so that meant he was looking at a location north of the equator and east of the prime meridian. He’d handled enough European missions to know that the numbers put the location in Italy somewhere in the vicinity of Venice. Five minutes with a map that he found on one of the shelves in the archives gave him the precise location.

It was an island in the Venice lagoon.

Poveglia, it was called.

Cade felt the hair on his arms stand up on end; the island’s reputation preceded it and he was all too familiar with the place.

Known equally by both its official name – Poveglia – as well as the unofficial ones – Plague Island, the Island of Madness, the Island of Death – Poveglia had been many things over the years. It had first entered history as a dumping ground for dead and dying plague victims in the Roman era and it had served that purpose again in the mid-1300s when the Black Death rolled across Europe. More than 100,000 people were supposedly thrown into huge plague pits and set ablaze during that time, giving rise to the still-persistent rumor that the soil there was more than fifty percent human ash. Fishermen avoided the waters around the island for fear of scooping up the water-polished bones of their ancestors when pulling in their nets, or so the sayings went.

In the opening years of the 15th century the world’s first lazaretto, or quarantine facility, opened on Poveglia, requiring maritime passengers to Venice who showed signs of illness to remain on the island for forty days – quaranta giorni - to be certain they weren’t carrying anything that could infect the citizens of the city. Several centuries later, the cause of helping the sick would return to the island, with the founding of a hospital for the mentally sick in 1922. For a few years things went well and the island’s reputation might have recovered if the head physician’s penchant for performing secret experiments on the patients as part of his personal quest to find a cure for madness hadn’t come to light. The hospital lighthouse, in actuality the remains of a bell tower from a 12th century church that once stood on the spot the hospital now occupied, became particularly notorious as the stage where many of these horrid experiments took place.

It therefore seemed fitting, Cade thought, that the doctor himself perished after a fall from that very tower. Some legends said that he threw himself from the heights of the tower when he began to go mad, believing that he was seeing not just the spirits of the plague victims from centuries past but also the ghosts of the patients who died from his own brutal experimentation. Other legends said that he didn’t commit suicide at all, but was pushed from the heights by those very same ghosts. Many claimed that he could still be seen wandering the grounds of the abandoned hospital, searching for atonement from those he had wronged.

With a legacy of death and destruction like that attached to its name, it wasn’t a surprise that many now considered the island one of the most haunted places in all of Europe and avoided it at all costs. The locals had learned to shun the place and had done so now for several decades.

Cade remembered hearing something about a private owner buying the island a few years ago with an intent to renovate the old hospital but nothing had ever seemed to come to fruition.

Now perhaps he knew why.

It was actually rather fitting, he thought. What better place for the Forsaken One than on the world’s most forsaken island?

It was clever, no doubt about it. Hiding in plain sight was an ages-old trick; hell, the Templars had been doing it for centuries. But using the natural history of the place as an extra layer of protection, letting the rumors and superstitions work in concert with each other to keep even most intrepid of explorers away? That was pure genius! Having the occasional ghost hunter or urban explorer vanish without a trace would only further the reputation of the place.

Cade’s respect for the creature, whatever it actually might be, went up a notch.

Perhaps he might find what he needed there after all.

Thankfully, getting to Poveglia from Rosslyn wouldn’t be much trouble. He could catch a flight out of Edinburgh directly to Venice. Once there he could either find a fisherman willing to take him across the lagoon or steal a boat and get there himself. Once on the island he would need to find the Forsaken One, but he didn’t expect that to be too difficult, given the resources at his disposal.

Feeling enthused for the first time in weeks, Cade replaced the materials he’d been using – not wanting to give anyone who came after him clues as to where he had gone – and then grabbed his gear and headed across the room toward the door. Getting in had been easy, but getting out?

That was going to be a tad more difficult.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Cade opened the door of the archives and strode down the hall without hesitation, doing all he could to project a sense of being right where he was supposed to be and hadn’t, in fact, just broken into one of the most secure repositories of arcane and mystical information on the face of the entire planet.

Well, maybe not that secure, he thought with a smile, then hurriedly wiped it away lest someone wonder what he was smiling at.

Cade was a strong believer in the theory that if you appeared to know where you were going and looked like you belonged, most people assumed you were in the right place and didn’t bother you. With that in mind he strode over to the door to the archives, opened it, and stepped out into the hallway as if he had every reason to be there.

Normally there were two guards manning the post in front of the archives but for whatever reason they weren’t currently there.

Maybe the Seneschal sent them away, Cade thought, as he headed down the corridor at a brisk walk.

Given that this section of the castle was off-limits to all but a select few, Cade didn’t expect to run into anyone until he reached the higher levels. Once he did, once he was back on the ground floor, he intended to hide in plain sight, milling among all the other knights going about their business in the Order’s headquarters until he could get to the garage and commandeer a vehicle which he could use to take him to the airport.

It was a simple plan, but then again, those were the best kind, Cade thought.

It might have worked, too, if they hadn’t been waiting for him around the next corner.

Four men, all of them of good size and height, no easy pushovers. They’d been lounging against the walls on either side of the corridor but pushed off and moved to the center in a staggered diamond formation when they saw him come around the bend. All of them were armed with handguns in either shoulder or belt holsters. If the gleam in their eyes was any indication they weren’t strangers to physical violence.

Behind them, smiling in satisfaction at Cade’s apparently anticipated appearance, stood Preceptor Johannson.

“I see the prodigal son has returned home at last,” the Preceptor began in his typical pretentious fashion, but Cade didn’t wait around to hear any more.

Turning around and running wasn’t an option; there wasn’t anything behind him but the Archives and that was a dead-end. The only way out was forward, which meant he was going to have to go through the group assembled in front of him.

Cade knew that if they wanted to kill him outright they would have already drawn their weapons and fired. They were so close that there was no way they could have missed. Likewise, if they were worried that he would fire on them first, they would have set their ambush further up the hall where there was a long stretch of defensible position just before the elevators. The fact that they’d braced him where they had indicated that they wanted the chance to subdue him, to take him captive, most likely in order to question him later for information about the Adversary.

Information that he didn’t have, of course.

Not that any of that mattered to Johannson. For whatever reason he was fixated on Cade and intended to make an example of him. Cade couldn’t allow that to happen, not now that he had the first good lead he’d had in more than seven years; the kind of lead that might shed some much needed illumination on everything that was going on.

He could not, would not, be delayed.

Gabrielle was counting on him.

All of this flashed through Cade’s mind as he came around the corner and saw the welcoming party waiting for him. Options presented themselves and were just as quickly discarded as he summed up the situation and then, with reflexes honed by years fighting some of the most dangerous creatures on the face of the planet, he made his decision.

Before the Preceptor could say another word Cade let out a ear-splitting yell and charged forward!

It was the last thing the foursome was expecting apparently, for Cade caught them all flat-footed and unprepared. He swung his go-bag up in front of him as he reached the lead man, slamming it into the other man’s chest and tangling up his arms for a few precious seconds. That was all Cade needed to raise one leg and viciously slam the edge of his foot into the outside of the man’s knee, hyper-extending it and sending him crashing to the ground with a leg that probably wouldn’t bear his weight again without extensive physical therapy.

Lucky for Cade, Busted Kneecap fell right into the path of the next man rushing forward from behind, taking him down in a tangle of limbs and cries of pain.

Keep moving! Cade thought and surged forward toward the next man in his path, knowing speed and surprise were his only advantage. If one of them pulled their gun and took a shot...

Thankfully gunning him down where he stood didn’t seem to be an option for whatever reason. Perhaps the Preceptor wanted him taken alive to be questioned or maybe just made a public spectacle of. Either way, the third man in Johannson’s crew, a wide-bodied bald-headed guy that reminded Cade of a short Kojack, had all the time in the world to draw a weapon and point it in Cade’s direction, but chose instead to meet Cade’s forward rush with a flurry of punches targeted at his face and body. The guy was fast, Cade had to give him that, but it was immediately obvious that he wasn’t in the same league as Cade. The former Echo Team commander used his hands and arms to block the blows directed at his head, not wanting to risk being dazed by a lucky shot, but let the ones aimed at his body intentionally slip past his defenses, giving the impression that other man was succeeding with some of his blows. He knew from experience that he could take a lot more than the guy was dishing out and letting him get a few shots in would help lull him into a sense of superiority.

Cade knew the moment it happened; the guy began swinging from the hip in an attempt to land a crushing blow that would knock Cade out of the fight. That slight change caused his defenses to open up by an equal amount and that was just the opening Cade needed. His hands shot out, and he grabbed the other man by his ears and yanked the guy forward and down even as Cade drove his knee upward.

There was a loud crack as knee met face and then Cade shoved the injured man away from him and pushed forward.

He could see the Preceptor over the shoulder of the final man standing in his way and Cade got an odd sense of satisfaction at seeing the fear rising on the man’s face as Cade plowed through three of his hand-picked men. Just one more to go...

Number four was going to be a tougher opponent, Cade could tell just by the way he was standing; loose and ready, his hands held up in front of him like a boxer but with fists open, ready to be used in a variety of ways. Getting through him was going to take both effort and time. He was ready for the former but didn’t have any of the latter to spare. If the Preceptor had sent out an alarm, reinforcements were probably already on their way. Cade needed to take this guy out quickly...

As the other man moved in, Cade stopped short, held up his hands, and said, “Okay, you win. I surrender.”

Number four hesitated, obviously confused by Cade’s actions. Cade didn’t blame him; he’d just barreled through three other men and now, with just one left standing, he suddenly wanted to surrender?

It was that very confusion that Cade was hoping for.

The other man turned slightly, as if looking back toward the Preceptor to see what he should do, and in that second of distraction Cade made his move.

He lashed out with a front snap kick, driving the ball of his foot directly into the groin of the man standing in front of him, and suddenly there was no one standing between him and his target, Preceptor Johannson.

Cade couldn’t help but smile.

He walked forward, intending to grab the Preceptor and use him as a decoy, a shield if necessary to get out of the complex.

Johannson looked from side to side, uncertain what to do, reminding Cade of a panicked bird.

Cade was less than five feet from the man when he felt two sharp little jabs in the center of his back, as if someone had just poked him with a pencil. Even as his mind was processing that, he was hit with 25,000 volts of electricity through the wires attached to the Taser darts now stuck in his back. Almost immediately his body began to twist and shake as the electrical current now coursing through him began to overpower his ability to use his arms and legs.

It was a testimony to his toughness that he managed to turn enough to look behind him and see the second of his four assailants, the one that he been knocked to the ground in the initial confrontation, staring down the barrel of his Taser, his finger jammed hard on the trigger.

Cade’s legs refused to obey him another second longer and he collapsed to the floor, jerking and twisting as the current surging through him, still looking back at the man with the gun.

Should have kicked him in the head as I went by, Cade thought in annoyance.

As Cade looked on, the other man lowered the Taser, walked over, and, as if he’d heard Cade’s own thoughts, drew back his foot and kicked Cade in the temple.

Darkness descended.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

What had been a rather heated conversation just moments before as Riley came down the hallway dropped to a dull whisper and then died entirely as he stepped inside the locker room.

Normally he would have ignored it; the men had a tendency to be closed-mouthed whenever an officer was present, even if, like himself, the officer had come up through the ranks. It was to be expected to some degree. But something about the way several of the men kept stealing glances in his direction as he passed through the room finally brought him to a halt.

He looked around; of the two dozen or so men that stood around the room in various shades of undress following an exercise drill, the majority of them would not meet his eyes. Those that did seemed to do so defiantly, as if daring Riley to say something.

To their surprise, and perhaps even his own, he did.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

No one said anything. “Grover? Chambers? What’s the problem here?”

The former didn’t say anything, but the later, Chambers, looked away as he said, “No problem, sir.”

Riley was about to press the issue – there obviously was a problem of some kind or another – when someone in the back of the room said, “I think they should hang him.”

The Echo Team commander couldn’t tell who had spoken, so he asked the room in general. “Hang who? And for what?”

No one said anything.

A feeling of dread began to drift its way up his spine. Suddenly he knew that something had gone terribly wrong. Now he just needed to find out what.

“When I ask a question, I expect an answer. One last time, hang who and for what?”

This time one of the men from the back of the room stepped forward. Riley recognized him as one of the new replacements that had been brought into the strike team ranks in recent months by Preceptor Johannson. Pasquale, Riley thought his name was.

“The Heretic. Williams. You ask me it should have been done a long time ago,” the man said with a sneer, looking around at the other men to see who was with him.

Hang Cade? Riley couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

Nor seeing, for that matter. A number of the men were nodding in agreement with Pasquale. Most were rookies, but there were a handful of veterans doing the same. It was as if the Preceptor’s whisper campaign against Cade had wiped away the years of sacrifice he had made on the Order’s behalf.

The rest of the men were muttering darkly as well, but their ire was directed at their comrades rather than at Cade. A tension sprang into the air, one that hadn’t been there moments before. It was as if voicing their opinions to a superior officer had suddenly made their differences all the more real. If left unchecked, Riley had no doubt that fists would be flying before long.

Dissension like this was a cancer festering in the ranks, and he needed to cut it out before it grew too big to be contained.

He walked across the room until he stood toe-to-toe with Pasquale. Riley had six inches on the other man, never mind seventy-five pounds, and so Pasquale was forced to crane his neck upward to look him in the eye, which was just what Riley wanted. It was awfully hard to stare someone down if you were forced to look up and it didn’t take more than a few seconds for the rookie to break eye contact and look away.

Riley kept the grin of satisfaction off of his face. Instead, he turned and looked over the rest of the men in the room, making it absolutely clear that he wasn’t happy with them.

Into the silence, he said, “Let me be absolutely clear. The next time I hear someone make a remark about “hanging” Knight Commander Williams or any other member of this Order, I will have him facing a court martial for threatening a fellow Templar faster than you can Jimminy Cricket, is that clear?”

“Yes, sir!”

Riley glared at them all once more and then said, “I’m sure you’ve all got things to do. Get to them. Dismissed!”

As the men returned to their tasks, Riley caught Chambers’ eye and indicated that he should follow. He led the other man a short way down the hall where a conference room stood empty and open. Riley stepped inside, gestured for Chambers to do the same, and then asked, “What the hell was that all about?”

“You haven’t heard then, sir?”

“Heard what? I’ve been holed up writing after-action reports all morning.”

Chambers hesitated.

“God in heaven, Chambers. Just tell me, will ya? It can’t be that bad.”

But it was.

Worse even.

“Commander Williams was caught trying to assassinate the Grand Master earlier this morning.”

“What? You have got to be kidding me!”

“No joke, sir. There are conflicting reports about how it happened, but one thing is clear – Knight Commander Williams was involved and by all accounts, he tried to kill Grand Master Devereaux in his sleep.”

Riley didn’t know what to say. Cade? Kill the Grand Master?

He thanked Chambers for filling him in, dismissed him, and then continued to his office where he used his desktop to access the communications system and pull the office report from the server. It had been emailed to all senior staff half an hour ago yet somehow his name had been left off the recipients list, despite his position as a strike team commander. He didn’t bother to contact Communications to try and find out why, for he knew he’d just be told that it was an “oversight” and that it wouldn’t happen again.

Yeah, oversight my ass, he thought sourly, as he sat down to read the report.

It didn’t say much; just that former Knight Commander Williams had been captured inside Rosslyn Castle after making an armed attempt on the Grand Master’s life and that he was being questioned concerning his relationship and interaction with the Adversary.

Riley didn’t believe it, of course; Cade might be slipping when it came to keeping his anger in check when dealing with creatures of a supernatural persuasion and he’d certainly lost it the other night on the bridge when Riley had tried to open fire on the Adversary, but Cade would never try to kill the head of the Order.

At least, Riley thought, not without good reason.

Right?

But the more he thought about it, the less certain Riley became. Cade’s behavior had grown more and more erratic since the confrontation with the Necromancer, Simon Logan, and had only gotten worse with every day that his wife, Gabrielle, remained under the Adversary’s control. Where a year ago he couldn’t have imagined Cade doing anything that could potentially harm the Order, times certainly had changed. That had been before Cade had been ordered to abandon men on the battlefield, before he’d been accused of consorting with the enemy, before those he thought of as friends and allies had been forced to fire upon his beloved wife. Riley could easily come up with half-a-dozen scenarios where Cade might feel violence against the Grand Master was necessary to reach a certain end.

He still didn’t think the rumors were true, but now he couldn’t just dismiss them out of hand.

Besides, even if they weren’t true, his friend could still be in trouble. If there was anything the last few weeks had shown it was that former Knight Commander Cade Williams had made more than his fair share of enemies within the hallowed ranks of the Templars, starting with Preceptor Johannson himself.

Who just happened to be in Scotland right now.

The coincidence was too great to ignore. Johannson had something to do with this mess; Riley was certain of it.

And that meant that Riley had a decision to make.

He’d been relieved of heading up the search for the Adversary, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still an integral part of the process. With the exception of Cade, Riley was probably one of the few Templars that had faced the Adversary at full strength and lived to tell the tale. That made him an invaluable resource to the search; he hated to admit it, but it was true.

They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the Adversary since the encounter on the bridge two nights earlier. It had gone to ground as effectively as it had for the two weeks prior. Riley didn’t know if that was intentional or a result of the fact that the Adversary seemed to be having some trouble controlling the body that it was inhabiting. If it was having any trouble at all, he thought. Whole thing could just be a big ruse to throw us off.

Of course the Adversary could surface again at any moment. If it did, Echo would get called out to support Gamma Team when they tried to take it down. Given his knowledge, Riley would be expected to be there, even if he was no longer in charge of the primary search.

But experience was telling him that there was very little he could do from here to help Cade, especially if Johannson was behind the whole mess as he suspected him to be.

If there was anyone who could help Cade, it would be the Seneschal. Cade had reported directly to Ferguson for several years and their interaction had always been one of mutual respect and admiration. It was only in the aftermath of the Chiang Shih incident that the chain of command had been revised to require the head of each special combat team to report to their local Preceptor and Riley didn’t think Ferguson ultimately had anything to do with that decision. In fact, Riley was pretty sure the Seneschal had argued against it as vehemently as Cade had.

Riley might not have the political power needed to make a difference in Cade’s current situation, but the Seneschal certainly did. If Riley could get him on Cade’s side of the issue, then Cade stood a chance.

And therein lay the problem. It was going to take a bit of effort, never mind time, to layout all that had happened to Cade and his wife since their first encounter with the Adversary and to get the Seneschal to understand Cade’s recent reluctance to do anything that might endanger his chances of getting her back, limited though they may be. Riley had no doubt that his chances of success would be greatly increased if he had the discussion in person but that meant traveling to Scotland and cutting out on his duties here.

Duties? What duties? Johannson cut you out of the search and gave your task to Gamma Team, remember?

It was that, more than anything else, that helped him make up his mind. Cade had saved his life more than once in their years together and there was no way he could desert his friend now, especially not when Cade’s judgment seemed to be floundering in the wake of his grief.

Scotland it was.

Now he just had to figure out how to get there.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The first thing Cade saw when he opened his eyes was Preceptor Johannson. The other man stood on the opposite side of a door made of bullet-resistant glass, dressed in his characteristic Saville Row suit, and stared in at Cade with an expression that spoke volumes about his intentions.

Asshole, Cade thought.

Realizing he was lying with the side of his face against a cold stone floor, Cade put his palms flat against the floor beneath him, intending to push himself up into a sitting position, and the Preceptor’s trap was sprung.

The second his bare hands came in contact with the floor of his cell Cade was overwhelmed with a barrage of emotions that blasted out of the stone beneath him. It was like getting hit with a fire hose on full blast, but instead of water the hose carried the emotional detritus of the prisoners who’d touched that floor before him, who had wept or cried or raged at the situation in which they’d found themselves. Sometimes the prisoners had been wounded and sometimes they’d been completely psychotic; both their agony and their madness were bound up in the surface of the tiles that they had touched and were contained in the torrent that swept over him,

A scream burst involuntarily from his lips as his mind sought to make sense of all it was seeing and feeling; if he’d been a weaker man, he could easily have been reduced to a gibbering shadow of the man he’d once been. As it was he barely had the strength and presence of mind to realize what was happening and yank his hands away from the floor as he forced himself into a sitting position.

For a moment, it was all Cade could to just breathe.

His heart was jack-hammering in his chest so hard that he thought he might break a rib or two and his body was trembling uncontrollably from the massive dose of adrenaline that had poured into his system. Worse yet, he was having trouble sorting out his memories from those that his psychometry had forced him to experience. Images kept flooding his mind and with them all the sensory perceptions that had gone along with them and yet he knew, somewhere deep in his mind, that he hadn’t physically lived through a single one of them.

It was enough to drown a man in a river of madness.

If he hadn’t had years of practice dealing with his Gift he might have lost himself then and there, might have drifted into a world of unrealities without any means of finding his way back and spent the rest of his days as a gibbering idiot.

Thankfully, after several minutes of effort, he got his thoughts and his body back under control.

Looking down at his hands, he saw that his gloves had been removed, most likely while he’d been unconscious. Nor were his gloves the only things; his clothing had been taken from him and replaced with an orange jumper, just like the kind they issued to all of their long-term prisoners.

Cade was furious, both for the loss of his gloves – which he needed if he was going to get out of this place - and for the loss of his clothing, but he didn’t let either show on his face.

He could feel Johannson standing there, watching him from outside the door, but Cade ignored him for the moment, turning his attention instead to figuring out where he was.

The room they had him in was small – no more than eight by eight, he guessed – and was devoid of any kind of furnishings except for a chemical toilet in one corner. Cade recognized the room immediately as one of the temporary holdings in the basement of the commandery. It was missing the usual meager cot that they provided to the inmates, but the foot-thick reinforced glass door that provided the only entrance and exit to the cell and the toilet were dead giveaways.

He’d put more than his fare share of monsters – human or otherwise – in cells like this over the last seven years and knew exactly how difficult they were to break out of. He was going to have to be patient and wait for them to take him somewhere else before trying to escape.

Unfortunately patience was not one of his virtues.

He looked over at the Preceptor, still standing outside the door, and thought, Maybe there’s a quicker way out.

Cade walked over and stood in front of the door. A narrow slot, no more than two inches high and eight inches wide, set into the door at chest height allowed him to converse with anyone standing outside his cell.

Cade decided to go on the offensive.

“I don’t know what your game is, Johannson, but I suggest you open this door and let me out immediately.

“No, I don’t think so,” the other man said.

“Your men attacked a senior commander in the Order; the Seneschal, never mind that the Grand Master will not be pleased to hear it.”

Johannson laughed. “On the contrary, the Grand Master will be quite pleased.”

He reached inside the suit coat he was wearing and removed a piece of paper. He unfolded it and then held it up so Cade could read it.

“You might find this of interest,” he said with a wink.

One glance was all it took for Cade to recognize it as a formal proclamation from the office of the Grand Master; he’d seen enough of them during his years in the Order, after all. He skipped past the legalese at the top and jumped down to the meat of the order.

Words jumped out at him.

Former Knight Commander Cade Williams.

Conspiring with the enemy.

Excommunicated.

Considered armed and highly dangerous.

He didn’t bother reading any further.

“It’s all bullshit and you know it,” Cade said, trying not to show how much it had rattled him. Now the Seneschal’s unwillingness to get involved made more sense; anyone who associated with an excommunicated individual was at risk for the same. Cade’s faith might be on rocky ground – despite all he’d seen and done – but for many of the troops it was the solid bedrock beneath them and the very reason they stayed in the fight. Even his staunchest allies would be hard pressed to support him at this point.

“Bullshit? Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that very much,” the Preceptor said. “But we’ll know for sure soon enough.”

The words were out before Cade could catch them. “What does that mean?”

“That depends on you, I guess. Are you willing to talk?”

Cade didn’t hesitate. “Sure,” he said, “what do you want to know?”

Johannson frowned; it wasn’t the answer he’d been expecting, apparently.

“Don’t think you can fool me, Williams. You’re going to tell us what you and the Adversary are planning one way or another, so why make it difficult on yourself? Tell us what we want to know and I’ll see to it that your prison time is at least comfortable.”

Cade nearly laughed.

How stupid did this idiot think he was? The Templar code made it perfectly clear about what happened to those who actively conspired with the enemy. Prison time was not one of the options. With the Grand Master declaring him persona non grata, they were just as apt to drag him in front of a firing squad as listen to anything he had to say in his defense.

Still, he’d play along. If he could get out of this cell he might be able to make a break for it. He’d worry about clearing his name later; right now, the clock was ticking and he needed to get to Venice.

“Fine,” he said. “You’ve got me dead to rights. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” He waved his hand at the cell around him. “There’s no need for this; take me somewhere civilized and let’s discuss it like men.”

Johannson wouldn’t be fooled that easily, however. “I don’t believe you,” he said to Cade, “but that’s fine. You don’t have to convince me anyway. My people will get to the truth. We can talk about what you need to do to atone for your sins once you’ve had a chance to chat with them. I’m sure you’ll be in a more receptive state of mind at that point anyway.”

Cade wanted to reach through the slot and knock the smile of satisfaction off of Johannson’s face, but he knew that wouldn’t get him anything but momentary satisfaction. He’d still be here, locked in up a cell, and Johannson would be pissed off instead of smug.

Smug was less dangerous.

Still, he couldn’t let the Preceptor’s challenge – and it was a challenge, for Cade knew exactly how the Inquisitors got their information – go unanswered.

“By all means, bring them on down. I’ve got all day to sit around and talk,” Cade said with a belligerent smile. “You might want to make sure you have enough men this time, though, given how my last “chat” with your people went.”

Johannson answered Cade’s smile with one of his own.

“Oh, I think I have all the men I’m going to need,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”

Johannson then reached out and slid the cover over the slot, cutting off anything else Cade might have been about to say. Still smiling, he waved to someone down that hall out of Cade’s line of sight.

Sweet dreams?

Given its source, the usually pleasant phrase had a decidedly ominous tone to it and Cade knew in that second that he’d missed something.

Something important.

He turned away, dismissing the Preceptor with seemingly casual indifference, but inside his thoughts were whirling. Johannson clearly thought he had the upper hand. Maybe that was just because he was out there and Cade was in here, but he didn’t think so.

There was more to it than that.

From the corner of his eye he could see that Johannson was still watching him, as if waiting for something to happen, so Cade began to think that whatever it was, its arrival was rather imminent.

What was it Johannson said? Sweet dreams?

He glanced around the room, but didn’t see anything beyond the sink and the chemical toilet. Certainly nothing that could be a danger to him. There were a couple of scuff marks on the floor where the bed had been, but that was all.

What the hell…?

As he turned his gaze swept over the slot in the door in front of him, the slot that Johannson just closed from the outside, effectively isolating Cade’s cell from the rest of the facility.

He froze.

Almost unwillingly his head turned slightly and his gaze swept up the wall next to the door, all the way to the top where narrow ducts had been set into the wall just below the point where it met the ceiling.

Ducts that were part of the cell’s state-of-the-art air filtration system.

If a prisoner got too unruly, they could lower the amount of air getting to that individual cell or, if they had to take someone down fast, they could pump in a gas-based sedative and let nature take its course. Once the prisoner was too weak to put up a fight, a squad of guards could be sent in to deal with the situation without any fuss.

Suddenly Johannson’s “sweet dreams” made a hell of a lot more sense.

Cade stopped and listened. It took a moment, but once he shut out the sound of his pounding heart, he could make out a slight hissing sound at the edge of his hearing.

He didn’t envy the thought of being knocked unconscious for the third time in as many days.

The Preceptor was still watching him, no doubt waiting for him to start panicking, but he’d be damned if he would give the man a show. He was reasonably confident they wouldn’t kill him – they still thought he had information to provide. So short of an accidental overdose they would probably just gas him unconscious in order to move him to an interrogation room without putting themselves in danger.

It was the smart thing to do, after all, and a procedure that Cade himself had put into place for all such facilities in the Templar network three years earlier.

Not that it mattered; he was still pissed that they were using it on him.

Rather than wait for the gas to knock him on his ass, Cade walked to the center of the room and laid down on the ground. To be sure his bare hands didn’t touch anything when he passed out, he stuck them as deep into his pockets as he could manage.

After that, there wasn’t much to do but listen to the hiss of the gas and wait.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Getting to Scotland turned out to be easier than Riley thought it would be.

After making up his mind, Riley returned to his quarters and logged onto his computer. He wasn’t the tech whiz that Olsen had been, but he’d learned a thing or two from his former squad-mate that he put to good use now. When he was done, he printed out what he needed and then sent the rest of it winging its way through cyberspace to its final destination. It wouldn’t hold up to a forensic search, but it would certainly do the trick for the time being.

He quickly packed a bag and headed for the heliport where he tracked down one of the Blackhawk pilots he was friendly with and had him ferry him over to John F Kennedy airport, where the Order maintained a small selection of aircraft operated under the Vatican flag. A cargo plane was getting ready for a flight to Edinburgh, so Riley concocted a story about needing to be at the commandery before dawn and managed to secure a seat in the back with the cargo for the passage over. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable overseas trip he’d ever had, but it served its purpose and Riley had long ago given up any pretensions that comfort was a right that everyone was guaranteed. He knew better; he was a Templar, after all.

He did his best to catch some sleep which bouncing around on the bench seat in back and arrived in Edinburgh just over seven hours after boarding the plane in New York. He quickly made his way to Immigration and Customs, his Vatican-issued passport whisking him through the process without hassle or delay. Ten minutes later he was behind the wheel of a rental car, headed south toward the village of Roslin and the sprawling underground complex that housed the Templar world headquarters in the hills just beyond.

He entered through the De Molay Gate, named after the famed Grand Master who had been burned at the stake in 1307 for refusing to divulge the whereabouts of the Templar’s vast treasure to Pope Innocent and his ally, the King of France. The treasure had, in fact, been stored in the very first iteration of the very facility he was entering and Riley always tried to take this route when he could, if only to honor the man who had preserved their Order with both his foresight and his bravery. He left the car with one of the motor pool attendants, logged his entry into the commandery as was required, and then headed for the administrative wing in hopes of scoring an audience with the Seneschal.

It was late in the evening so the halls were empty for the most part and it didn’t take him long to get to his destination. To his surprise, and relief, he found the Seneschal’s aide still at his desk. He stepped up, identified himself, and asked for an immediate audience with the Seneschal.

“It is literally a matter of life and death.”

But the aide wasn’t moved. “I’m sorry, Captain Riley, but the Seneschal is in a meeting at the moment and won’t be done for several hours.” He glanced at his computer screen. “I can fit you, um, say mid-morning on Thursday?”

Riley wanted to laugh. He’d walked in the door saying it was a matter of life and death and this flunky wanted him to settle for an appointment seventy-two hours from now? Not going to happen.

“As I said, it’s rather urgent. I’ll wait for him to finish his meeting.”

Riley took a seat and settled in, over the aide’s protests. There wasn’t much the man could do short of calling security and Riley highly doubted that was going to happen. Riley was beginning to discover that there was a certain amount of prestige that went along with being head of the Order’s special combat teams and it wasn’t beyond him to throw his weight around a bit to ensure he got what he wanted or needed for his men.

He was going to see the Seneschal about Cade and that was that.

Riley had a bit more patience than Cade did, but only a little; both were men of action and sitting around and waiting for someone else to take the necessary action was not something that sat well with either one of them. The current Echo Team commander managed the first half-hour without too much trouble, but as that began to sink into an hour and beyond, his boredom began to turn to annoyance.

To get his point across, he took to staring directly at the aide for long periods of time, refusing to look away whenever the man looked up. Eventually he got so flustered that he jumped out of his seat, excused himself, and disappeared into the Seneschal’s inner office.

Riley was tempted to follow him inside, but resisted the urge, knowing the Seneschal was a bit of a stickler for proper decorum and Riley didn’t want to damage his chances of talking to the man by being pushy.

The aide was only gone a few minutes. When he returned he handed Riley a folded piece of paper with a decidedly relieved look on his face before returning to his seat at his desk.

Riley unfolded the piece of paper and saw that it was a handwritten note.

Captain Riley, it began.

I admire your dedication and support of our mutual friend but I have done all I can for the time being. Enjoy your stay in Scotland; I understand the chapel restoration looks particularly spectacular in the morning sunlight.

It was signed, Ferguson.

When he was finished reading, Riley folded the note up and stuffed it deep in his pocket. He thanked the aide for his help and then left the Seneschal’s office at a brisk walk.

Ferguson’s barely-veiled request to meet him at the chapel in the morning certainly wouldn’t be hard for anyone else to suss it out should they stumble upon the message, but then again, it didn’t really matter if it was well-hidden or not. The note had come from the Seneschal and, if pressed, he could say that it meant exactly what it seemed to say – that Captain Riley should take the time to see the Rosslyn Chapel restoration before leaving. To suggest otherwise, to question the validity of the Seneschal’s word, would be a tact that only the most foolish would pursue.

At least one thing was clear; the Seneschal was not abandoning Cade to his fate. At least Riley didn’t think so. If he was, he simply would have told Riley that Cade was on his own. The fact that Ferguson was arranging for a clandestine meeting with Riley seemed to suggest that Cade still had some allies within the Templar hierarchy.

That was a good thing, a very good thing indeed.

A glance at his watch told him that it was getting pretty late, so he decided to grab a sandwich from the galley and secure a room for himself in the visiting officer quarters for the night.

He was headed down the hall to his assigned room, munching on a turkey sub as he went, when he heard someone call his name from behind.

“Captain Riley! A word, if you please?”

He turned to see Preceptor Johannson beckoning to him from the doorway of an office he’d just passed. The Preceptor did not look very happy to see him.

Shit, Riley thought as he turned and retraced his footsteps. Johannson was the last person he wanted to run into, but now that he had he needed to play it cool. Thankfully he’d prepared in advance.

He dumped his sandwich in a nearby trash can and kept his expression neutral as he stepped up to the office door.

Game time, he thought.

Johannson had already retreated into the room by the time Riley reached it. Looking in from the doorway he could see that it was one of the temporary offices used by visiting staff. It had minimal furnishings – a desk, an office chair, a desktop computer and printer on a nearby shelf. There were two chairs arranged in front of the office, but Johannson didn’t offer him a seat as he told him to step into the room and close the door.

Riley did as he was told without comment, but one word kept reverberating around in his head as he did so.

Asshole.

Johannson’s next comment did little to relieve him of his opinion either.

“What in hell are you doing here, Captain? Are you so incompetent that you think the Adversary has taken to hiding in the halls of this commandery?”

“Sir, I...”

“Relieving you of command of the search wasn’t enough for you? Do I need to assign you to guard duty to get you to focus on the mission you’re assigned?”

Riley tried again. “With all due respect, sir,”

He didn’t get any further as Johannson cut him off again. “I’m beginning to think that your friendship with that traitor Williams has deprived you of all of your common sense. First you have that fiasco on the bridge, then you allow him to escape custody, it’s like a bad...”

Riley withdrew a folded piece of paper from inside his jacket and, stepping forward, laid it without a word on the Preceptor’s desk.

Johannson stopped in mid-sentence and stared at it.

“What is that?” he asked, his nostrils flaring as if he’d smelled something putrid.

Riley had to work to hold in his laughter. It wasn’t easy.

“My orders, sir,” he said quietly.

“Orders?”

“Yes, sir.”

The Preceptor snatched up the piece of paper, opened it, and read what was printed there.

Riley could practically hear the Preceptor’s irritation growing by the word.

When he was finished, Johannson brandished the paper in front of him like a weapon, his fury exploding into the room. “Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell is this?!”

Without waiting for an answer, he pulled the computer keyboard closer to him and began pounding on the keys.

Riley didn’t need to see the screen to know that Johannson was pulling up the system that kept a record of all of the personnel orders issued across the Templar network and looking for the digital version of the set that Riley had just handed him. Orders that demanded Riley’s immediate presence in Rosslyn to discuss the Cade Williams situation. Orders supposedly issued by Seneschal Ferguson.

They weren’t, not really. Riley knew that because he’d hacked the system and issued them in Ferguson’s name. It would take a solid forensic investigation to prove that it hadn’t been issued by Ferguson, however, and Riley was confident that wasn’t going to happen in the near future. He cast a silent prayer heavenward to his old friend, Nick Olsen, for teaching him that particular trick; damn, but he missed him.

Johannson clearly wasn’t happy with what he found on the screen, for his face went a darker shade of red and there was now a thick vein throbbing visibly on the side of his head. Riley made sure to look away before he glanced up; the thousand yard stare over his shoulder was a tool every good noncom cultivated and he hadn’t lost his skill at it just because he’d been promoted to an officer.

The Preceptor sat fuming at the computer screen for a moment and then finally found his voice. “I don’t know what this is all about but I won’t stand for it. I am countermanding the Seneschal’s request and ordering you back to Ravensgate immediately to resume the search for the Adversary.”

Johannson simply didn’t have the authority to do what he was suggesting, but Riley didn’t think now was the best time to bring it up. He opted for an alternate tactic.

“The evening’s last flight has already left Edinburgh, sir. The next one isn’t until mid-morning.”

Johannson stared at him for a moment, then picked up his phone and called Operations, asking if there were any more flights to the States that evening.

Riley bit his tongue to keep him from saying anything and waited until the duty officer told Johannson the exact same thing – the last flight had left half an hour before and Edinburgh was closed for the night.

Johannson slammed down the phone. “I don’t know what bullshit you’re up to, Riley, but mark my words, if you cross me you will regret it. Now get out of my office and make sure you’re on that first flight out of here in the morning. That’s an order.”

This time Riley caught the man’s stare and held it, saying everything with his eyes that he couldn’t say with his mouth. When Johannson looked away first, Riley allowed a small smile to cross his face.

“Understood, sir,” he said and then turned and left the room, closing the door behind him as he went.

Asshole, he thought, as he headed off down the hall.

Orders or no orders, he had no intention of being on that flight.

# # #

When Cade came to, he found himself tied to a chair alone in an empty room.

His ankles were strapped to the chair’s legs while his wrists had been secured to the arms in similar fashion. His bare hands hung off the ends of the arm supports, but he couldn’t bend them back far enough to reach the knot just below his wrist on either side. Last but not least, a thick strap was wrapped several times around both his chest and the back of the chair.

He gave a few experimental tugs but whoever had done the work had done it properly. He wasn’t going anywhere.

Turning away from his bonds, he gave the room around him the rest of his attention.

The walls and the floor were bare stone and the only light came from a portable lamp that was hanging from an ancient-looking sconce set in the wall. An iron grate was set in the floor a few feet in front of him and it didn’t take much to imagine the kinds of things that had been sluiced between its bars over the years.

A wheeled cart was backed up against the wall directly in front of him. Several items were laid out for display across its top, which reminded Cade of some torturer’s cart from a B-grade horror flick. Except that instead of knives and saws and devices intended to maim and kill, these particular items were completely benign, in some cases even innocuous.

A hair brush.

A child’s doll.

A man’s ring.

A fist-sized rock.

There were a few more, but Cade lost interest at that point. His head was pounding, no doubt a holdover from whatever they’d gassed him with, and he didn’t know how long he was going to be alone, so he didn’t have time to worry about a cart full of junk. He needed to start thinking of a way to get out of here.

He considered and then just as quickly discarded the idea of shouting out for help. For one, it might simply bring his captors running and two, given the room in which he found himself, he seriously doubted anyone other than Johannson and his flunkies were close enough to hear.

There was a door across the room at his back, which was apparently the only way in or out. If he could get free of his bindings, he might be able to slip away down the hall before anyone knew that he was missing.

He put his feet flat on the ground and tried to push himself upright to a standing position. If he could hobble over to the nearest wall he might be able to smash the chair against it enough times to bend it out of shape, loosening his bonds in the process and giving him a way to free himself.

His captors were a step ahead of him, though, for the legs of the chair were bolted to the floor. No matter how hard he pushed, he couldn’t get them to come free.

Cade sat there fuming for a few seconds and then forced himself to refocus. The clock was ticking; every minute he spent tied up here meant he wasn’t out there helping Gabrielle. He needed to find a way out.

Unfortunately, despite another ten minutes of careful consideration, he couldn’t come up with any way of getting free of his bonds without outside help.

Looked like he was going to have to sit and wait for an opportunity to come to him.

It didn’t take long. The door behind him opened and then clanged shut. A few seconds later the Preceptor came into view, with another man in tow. Cade didn’t know the second man, but he recognized the cold indifference on the guy’s face.

Things were about to get ugly.

The Preceptor didn’t waste any time.

“Where is the Adversary?” he asked.

Cade didn’t bother to look at him, never mind answer the man.

“What is your relationship with the Adversary?”

He kept his eyes on the other guy instead, knowing instinctively that he was a much bigger threat than the Preceptor.

“You secured various relics on behalf of the Necromancer, Simon Logan. Why?”

And so it went. Question and question, with Cade refusing to answer any of them.

Eventually, Johannson tried a new tact.

“I’m glad you don’t want to do this the civilized way. What happens next will be much more interesting. For me, at least.”

Dismissing Cade, he turned to the interrogator and told him to proceed.

Cade didn’t want to be tortured any more than the next guy would and he felt his heart kick into overdrive as his mind flooded his body with adrenaline, readying him for the fight ahead. He intended to head butt Hughes as soon as the other man drew close enough to do so and he would be more than happy to do the same to Johannson if given the chance.

Once again, the Preceptor surprised him however.

“Start with the ring, please,” Johannson said.

Hughes picked the object up off the table and approached. Cade watched him come, expecting the interrogator to slip the ring onto his own finger so that he could do more damage when he began punching Cade in order to ‘soften him up’, so to speak, and was surprised when it didn’t happen. He was even more surprised when Hughes reached out and began trying to pry Cade’s left fist open.

That’s when it hit him.

The Preceptor knew about his Gift!

Cade clenched his fist as tight as he could, but he was weakened from everything he had been through up to this point and was no match for the beefy interrogator. As Hughes pried open his fingers, Cade screamed in defiance.

A scream that quickly changed to one of horror as the memories attached to the ring began playing out in his mind’s eye.

CHAPTER TWENTY

As the sun came up the next morning Riley found himself standing within the choir of Rossyln Chapel staring up at the flying buttresses overhead and waiting for the Seneschal to make contact.

Ferguson had been right; the renovation work on the chapel really made its beauty stand out. The building stood on a small hill above Rosslyn Glenn on the north bank of the River Esk and had originally been founded by William Sinclair, Earl of Caithness, as a Catholic collegiate church known as the collegiate Chapel of Saint Matthew. Riley knew that it was one of three places of worship built by Sinclair at Rosslyn – the others being the chapel inside Rosslyn Castle and the now-decaying Rosslyn Cemetery. Services were brought to an abrupt end at the chapel in 1560, when the Scottish Reformation overran the country. The building had lain fallow and open to the elements until the late 1860s when it was reopened at the order of James Alexander, 3rd Earl of Rosslyn, for services for the Scottish Episcopal Church.

In recent decades rumors had surfaced about the chapel’s connection to the Templars. Several of those rumors were actually near the mark, though the public didn’t know it, and the Order made sure things stayed that way.

The interior of the chapel was decorated with more than 110 Green Man images – carvings of human faces with greenery all around them – a symbol that Riley always found to be a rather unusual choice for a Catholic place of worship given their usual association with deities of fertility and rebirth. He wandered the interior while he waited, passing the time by examining several of the unique carvings, and was in the midst of taking a closer look at one in a bay along the north wall when the entire carving suddenly rotated 180 degrees.

Riley jumped back in surprise, which turned out to be a fortunate move because the granite slab he had been standing on chose that moment to slide to the left, revealing a staircase descending into the ground beneath the chapel floor.

A voice Riley recognized spoke out of the darkness below.

“Let’s move, Captain. We don’t have all day.”

Ferguson.

Riley did as he was told.

He hustled down the steps and found himself standing in a tunnel hewn from solid stone. The Seneschal stood waiting a few feet deeper in the passage and as Riley looked on he reached out and manipulated something on the wall beside him. A grinding sound filled the air around them and the light from the chapel above slowly faded as the stone slid back into place with a gentle thud.

There was a click and a light blossomed in the darkness from the camper’s lantern that the Seneschal was holding in one hand.

“This way,” he said, “we don’t have much time,” and without waiting for an answer he turned and headed down the tunnel at a brisk pace.

Riley hustled to catch up.

There were alcoves on either side of the tunnel and as they headed down its length Riley could see that each one appeared to be a burial chamber, complete with stone sarcophagi. With a start he realized that they must be in the original crypt, the entrance of which many had thought long since lost to history. Several generations of the Sinclair family were buried here and back in 1837, at the death of the 2nd Earl, Riley knew that the chapel had been extensively searched for over a week in an effort to find the entrance to this very place without any luck. Unable to find it, the Earl had been buried in the Lady Chapel, a smaller room off the main structure, alongside his late wife.

Apparently, the crypt hadn’t really been lost at all.

At least, not to the Templars, Riley thought.

They had been walking for nearly ten minutes before the Seneschal broke the silence.

“My apologies for last night,” he said. “I would have liked to have had the chance to speak with you, but events are moving faster than I anticipated. If we don’t act now, we might miss the opportunity to act at all.”

Events are moving faster than anticipated? Riley thought. What events? And what, exactly, had been anticipated?

He opened his mouth to ask but the Seneschal wasn’t finished.

“Commander Williams has been under Preceptor Johannson’s control for almost twenty-four hours now. Thanks to the Grand Master’s order declaring Williams persona non grata, it’s going to take time to get him released. Normally I would prefer to take the official route, but Johannson has already begun subjecting Williams to what he’s calling advance interrogation techniques in an effort to get him to reveal what he knows about the Adversary and I’m afraid Williams won’t last very long.”

Riley didn’t need a dictionary to know that “advance interrogation techniques” was just a polite term for torture. Nor was it hard to imagine Johannson subjecting Cade to repeated water boarding sessions and other methods of persuasion. He felt his blood boil at the thought of his friend in that asshole’s hands.

“We’ve can’t just leave him there! We’ve got to do something!”

The look Ferguson shot in his direction seemed to ask, “What on earth do you think we’re doing now?” and Riley sheepishly held up a hand in apology.

The last thing he wanted to do was alienate his only ally.

Ferguson went on. “Williams knows where to go from here. It is your job to get him out of the commandery and away from Johannson and his cronies. Think you can handle that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Ferguson stopped, glanced around as if assuring himself that he was in the right place, and then reached out and began running his fingers over the wall directly to his right.

Riley looked on curiously, wondering what the heck he was looking for and how it was going to help Cade, when suddenly the older man gave a mumbled, “Aha!” and the wall in front of them slid smoothly to the left.

Light shone into the tunnel from the hallway beyond.

Ferguson turned to him, his expression grave. “You’ll find Commander Williams in the left-hand cell at the very end of the hall, door code 5839. The guards have been taken care of, but you’ve only got about ten minutes before they come to so you’ll have to move quickly.” He pulled a small bundle of something made of cloth out of his pocket, handed it to Riley, and then guided him by the arm out into the hallway beyond, saying, “You have to get Williams out of here, no matter what. Quickly now!”

A bit dazed by the suddenness of it all, Riley glanced down to see that he was holding a very thin, skin-colored pair of cotton gloves. He recognized them as the kind that Cade wore on a daily basis to keep his psychometric ability from overwhelming him with unwanted emotional feedback.

If the Seneschal was giving him a spare set of gloves, then that meant…

The cold hand of fear reached out and seized his gut in its iron grip, preventing him from completing the thought. He looked up, intending to ask the Ferguson if his suspicions were correct, but the slab was already halfway closed and all he had time to do was catch the other man’s gaze for split-second before it fully closed, leaving him looking at a seamless section of stone that gave no clue to the opening hidden there.

Sonofa…

When in doubt, follow orders. He turned and hurried down the hall until he reached the duty station a dozen yards ahead. It was from here that a pair of guards usually monitored the prisoners in the cells just beyond. Unsurprisingly, he found both men lying unconscious on the floor by their chairs. Half-drunk cups of coffee stood next to each of their stations and it wasn’t hard for him to work out what had happened. Stepping over to the desk, he hit the button that unlocked the steel gates leading to the cell block and hustled through them before had even they finished opening, making a beeline for the last cell on the left.

One look through the glass enclosure was all it took to confirm Riley’s worst fears.

Cade lay face-down on the floor in the middle of his cell, shaking uncontrollably. Riley could see that Cade’s left hand was bare and was resting palm-down against the stone floor beside him, no doubt the reason for Cade’s jerking about. Whatever Cade was seeing through his Gift, it wasn’t good.

Riley punched the code into the lock – 5893 – and grabbed the handle, waiting for the light to turn green.

It beeped but the indicator remained stubbornly red.

“Come on!” Riley growled at it and tried again.

5-8-9-3.

Beep!

“Come on, you fucker!”

He slammed his palm against the glass in frustration, reached out a third time to try again, and then stopped himself as he remembered a crucial fact.

Three false entries and the combination electronically scrambles itself, requiring a supervisor’s override to get it open.

He’d already blown two of his three attempts.

Riley glanced at Cade convulsing on the ground less than ten feet in front of him and then quickly looked away, knowing that wasn’t going to help.

Focus, man, focus. You can do this!

He took a couple of deep breaths and then went back over what the Seneschal had said in his mind.

Left hand cell.

End of the hall.

Door code 5-8-

“3, you idiot! 3!”

His finger tapped on the keypad – 5839 – and this time the door lock disengaged with a gentle click.

He hauled open the door and rushed over to kneel beside Cade. He grabbed his friend by the shoulders and rolled him over on his back. He lifted Cade’s right hand, jammed one of the cotton gloves onto it, and then put it back down, before repeating the same with the left.

Cade’s convulsing stopped a few seconds after that.

Riley shook Cade’s shoulder gently. “Cade! Can you hear me, Cade?”

No response.

Conscious that the clock was ticking, Riley tried again, a bit harder this time.

“Wake up, boss! We gotta go!”

Cade stirred and mumbled something, but Riley couldn’t understand what he was saying.

Worry about it later, Riley said to himself. Right now, concentrate on getting both of you out of here while you still can.

He pulled Cade into a seated position, then slung him over one shoulder and lifted him up in a fireman’s carry. Forcing himself to his feet, he staggered for a moment until he got Cade’s weight adjusted properly, and then left the cell behind and headed down the hall as quickly as he could.

Clearly, he couldn’t just walk through the commandery with Cade draped over one shoulder, unconscious, so he was going to have to come up with a better plan to get them out. Thankfully, he thought he had one.

When he reached the duty station he gently lowered Cade into one of the chairs and then checked on the guards. Both were still unconscious and didn’t look like they’d be stirring any time soon.

Good. That’s one problem solved.

Riley grabbed the key ring off the guard’s belt and stepped over to the equipment closet. He slipped the key into the lock, said a quick prayer that they stocked the same equipment here as they did back at the Ravensgate commandery, and then opened it up.

A smile spread across his face when he flipped on the lights inside the closet and saw the collapsible stretcher pushed up against the back wall, right where he was hoping it would be.

The stretcher was typically used to transport a sick or injured prisoner from the cell block to the medical wing. In most commanderies, including this one, the medical wing was located close to the motor pool. Knights returning from combat missions often needed medical attention so having the two areas near each other was just common sense, but in this case the design was going to allow the two of them to reach their destination with minimal interference. The average knight wouldn’t dare interrupt a senior commander rushing a wounded comrade through the halls; if he ran into someone who outranked him, namely Johannson, he was screwed anyway.

Riley grabbed the stretcher and maneuvered it out into the main room, then pushed it over next to Cade. He bent over it, trying to figure out how to raise and lower the bed, and finally managed to do so after a few minutes of fussing with the mechanism.

When he was satisfied, he straightened up and turned, intending to roll Cade’s unconscious body out of the chair and onto the stretcher.

The chair was empty.

“Sorry, man,” he heard Cade say and then the other man’s fist slammed into his temple from the side and Riley knew no more.

# # #

Cade rolled Riley onto his back and then checked to be sure he was breathing. Satisfied that he was, Cade then moved to the nearest guard and began stripping him of the grey BDUs that identified him as one of the commandery security staff.

Thankfully, he was a bit heavier than Cade.

Cade had regained consciousness while Riley had been carrying him down the hall. It had taken him a few seconds to recover from the psychological overload caused by his Gift running rampant beneath his unprotected hands, but once he had he knew that he couldn’t allow his friend to endanger his position by participating in his escape. While Riley had been fetching the stretcher, Cade had decided that knocking him out and leaving him here with the guards was the best way of making it seem as if he’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Without evidence to the contrary, Johannson would have a hard time making any charges, even trumped up ones, stick.

After stripping the guard, Cade pulled the man’s uniform on over his own clothes and then dragged the underwear-clad man into the equipment closet, making sure to lock it behind him when he stepped out again.

A glance around the room prompted him to pick up the keycard, no doubt belonging to one of the two guards, that he saw resting on a nearby console, along with the set of keys that he found in Riley’s pants pocket. He would have loved to have found his gear pack and sword here at the duty station, but heaven only knew where they were and he didn’t have time to look for them. The sooner he got out of here, the better.

If he had even an hour’s rest, he would have simply taken the Mirror’s Road and left the commandery behind in a heartbeat. But the torture the night before, never mind the extended exposure to the emotional detritus of all those who had last occupied his cell before him, had left him with barely enough strength to stagger down the hall. If he travelled the Road into the Beyond, he’d be a sitting duck for anything with an appetite for the living, which, as near as he could tell, was just about everything on that side of the Veil. No, better to stay firmly on this side of reality.

Grabbing one of the guard’s ball caps, he put it on and pulled the brim down low, doing what he could to hide the scarring around his right eye, and then headed off down the hall without a backward glance.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Adversary handed off the body of its latest acquisition to its three waiting acolytes and watched with satisfaction as they rushed it over to the nearest bed and began re-attaching the various wire leads and plastic tubes that were needed to sustain it for the time being.

This one was a particularly good specimen, he thought, a lean but well-muscled warrior woman who had fallen in the line of duty just a week before. The bullet that had been her downfall had entered her head on the right side, hugged the interior of the skull cap, and exited on the left, doing just enough damage to put her into an indeterminate coma. Her long blonde hair had been shaved away prior to the surgery that had saved her life, leaving her skull looking like an oddly-shaped melon with fuzz growing atop it.

It was unfortunate but hardly relevant. Araqiel would be more interested in the body’s physique that in the length of its hair. Besides, the hair would grow back.

Two other patients, both male, occupied beds in the makeshift ward, leaving three more to be filled. The Adversary was confident its people would find the right candidates soon enough and when they did, he would retrieve them as he had all the others. When he had, the ritual could begin.

Soon, my brethren, he thought, looking at the bodies lying unmoving in the beds before him, soon we will be reunited.

A monitor above the bed of the patient nearest to him began beeping incessantly. He had no idea what it meant – that’s why the acolytes were there, after all – but he’d learned to press the reset button to stop the noise as he found the high-pitched warbling to be extremely annoying.

He stepped over to the monitor and reached up to silence the alarm, only to have his hand freeze in mid-air before he could complete the motion.

He frowned.

His finger was poised two inches from the surface of the button and he mentally ordered it to finish its arc.

His hand refused to listen to him.

It hung there, as still as stone, while that horrendous wail of an alarm continued to shout in his ear.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see that several of his acolytes had stopped what they were doing and were looking in his direction, no doubt wondering why he hadn’t switched off the alarm yet. Indignation and fury washed over him in equal measure at his loss of face, but no matter what he did he couldn’t get his hand to move.

In the darkest depths of his mind he heard a woman laughing.

Now he understood.

He’d been surprised when her personality had suddenly risen up the first time, when he’d been out searching for prey to ease his hunger, and she’d seized control of the body they inhabited together before he’d had time to lock things back down under his control. When he’d regained control, he’d found himself miles from where he’d intended to be, standing on the edge of a bridge in front of several dozen Templar knights, all of whom were trying to kill him and the body he inhabited. He’d managed to stuff her personality back into the depths of his mind and had taken control of their physical form quickly enough to escape serious injury as the Templars had opened fire. He’d even managed to send two of their souls to the Hell they belonged in before leaving them all in his wake.

He had no intention of ever letting something like that happen again. She would stay in her box where she belonged, until it was too late for her to do anything else and it no longer mattered.

He directed his attention down into the depths of his consciousness, down in the dark where that laughter originated.

Release me, he mentally commanded.

Silence.

I said, release me.

A mental image of a woman’s hand – the hand on the body that he had seized as his own – appeared before him, its middle finger raised.

A voice filled with righteous fury rose from the darkness.

Fuck you.

The woman’s insolence was obviously designed to anger him, but he merely found it amusing. That she thought she still had some control over what was going to happen was downright laughable. And if she was counting on that fool of a Templar to come rescue her, then she was in for an even bigger surprise. Williams had failed on the Isle of Sorrows and had done so again while trying to stop the ceremony that had called him back from the infernal plane. What hope did he have of succeeding this time? Absolutely, none.

The Adversary laughed aloud, knowing that she would hear it.

I will not ask again. You will either release me or I will slowly skin your husband alive inch by inch and savor his flesh while the two of you look on helplessly.

He made sure to call up a mental image of him torturing her fool of a husband in exactly the way he’d just described to be certain she understood what he intended to do if she continued with her impertinence. He let the scene roll out in his mind; her husband hanging naked in front of him, hands and legs bound, while he used claws that sprouted from the tips of her own fingers to slice just beneath the layer of skin and then slowly drag it downward to tear it lose from the body...

He caught a sudden burst of abject horror welling up from deep inside and then his hand jerked and he was free.

The Adversary completed the motion he’d started earlier, reaching forward and silencing the monitor with a quick poke of his finger while inside he laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

While his wife was battling the Adversary some two thousand miles away in the only manner that she was capable, Cade Williams was preparing to take an equally dangerous path, stepping out into the unknown and seeking help from an entity that even the Templars avoided at all costs.

As plans go, it wasn’t the greatest.

It was, in fact, pretty freaking stupid, if he was being honest with himself, but then again, what choice did he have?

He couldn’t leave things in the hands of the Order; they’d slaughter Gabrielle the moment they saw her in the belief that doing so would keep the Adversary from returning, but Cade knew first hand that evil would somehow find a way to come back. It had happened before and he had no doubt that it would happen again.

He didn’t know how or why the universe had elected him to be the one to constantly face this threat, but since it had happened he was determined to see it through.

It had taken him fifteen minutes to find his way through the Rosslyn commandery to the motor pool. He’d found a car from a local rental company there and taken that instead of stealing one of the commandery vehicles, figuring the missing rental wouldn’t be noticed as quickly. From there he’d driven himself to the Edinburgh airport.

It was the most obvious place for him to go and in a bit of reverse psychology he was hoping that it would be the last place the Order would look for him as a result. He expected them to assume that he would avoid the airport and go overland instead, maybe drive south to Hadrian’s Wall and cross into England. Echo had a safe house outside of London, which Riley knew about; it would be logical to think he would head in that direction. They knew he didn’t have any identification on him and getting aboard a flight without it these days was next to impossible, so the airport would be out, at least to most reasonable folk.

Cade wasn’t reasonable, however.

He needed to get to Venice and he needed to do it as quickly as possible. The drive from Edinburgh to London was at least seven hours, plus however long it took him to find a way across the border and then get to the safehouse. He guessed he was looking at ten hours plus and something told him that was too much time wasted. He needed to do better, hence his current plan. Arriving at the airport, he ditched the car in the long-term parking lot where he hoped it would remain unnoticed for a few days.

Once inside the terminal he checked the flight schedule at one of the free internet kiosks and discovered that there was a direct flight from Edinburgh to Venice at 1:30pm. That gave him roughly three hours to figure out a way to get some identification, buy a ticket, and get past security. If that didn’t work, he’d have to sneak past security and do something drastic like stowaway aboard an aircraft.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that.

Trying to think positively, Cade began to wander through the ticketing area, looking for an opportunity.

# # #

When Riley came to, he found himself surrounded by several individuals. His own commander, Preceptor Johannson, was there, as was the local commander and head of the European territory, Preceptor Ochoba. There were also a handful of local security officers that Riley didn’t recognize.

Seneschal Ferguson was kneeling next to where he laid stretched out on the floor.

On the floor? What was he doing down here?

“How are you doing, son?” Ferguson asked, reaching out and helping him into a sitting position.

Riley winced; his head was pounding and the side of his face hurt. “I feel like I went a couple rounds with Mike Tyson.”

He thought quickly. The last thing he remembered was getting the stretcher out of the equipment closet so he could transport Cade to...

Cade!

Cade had knocked him unconscious!

As if aware of his thoughts, Johannson suddenly pointed an accusing finger in his direction.

“You’d better have a good explanation for what you’re doing in a restricted area, Captain!”

Riley kept his head down to hide the sudden flash of fury that passed across his features. If it hadn’t been for the pressure Ferguson applied to his arm, silently warning him to tread carefully, Riley might have leapt to his feet and slugged Johannson in the face. That asshole had been torturing Cade and he intended to make him pay for it!

Thankfully Ferguson was thinking more clearly than he was and answered the Preceptor’s question.

“I requested Captain Riley’s presence here this morning,” the Seneschal said, looking up at the others. “I intended to question Commander Williams with the Captain present to help me ferret out incorrect answers, but I was delayed.”

Ferguson turned back to Riley. “Can you tell us what happened, Captain?”

Riley thought quickly.

“I arrived at the duty station to find both guards on the floor, apparently unconscious. I stepped over to the first man and was checking his pulse when I sensed movement behind me, from the direction of the equipment closet over there,” he said, waving his hand to indicate the direction he meant. “As I turned to look, something struck me hard in the side of the head.”

“Did you see who it was?” Ferguson asked.

Riley shook his head. “No, sir. Sorry.”

The older man smiled. “Not your fault, son. Sounds like he got the better of you, that’s all.”

“That’s certainly not all!” the Preceptor exclaimed. “Someone let that traitor Williams out of his cell and I want to know who!”

Riley shrugged, not trusting himself to answer. Further antagonizing the man probably wouldn’t be the best course of action, no matter how badly he felt the urge to do so. Better to focus his attention on finding Cade before the others did.

Ferguson helped him to his feet and then addressed the group.

“Commander Williams couldn’t have gotten far on his own,” he began, “so if we work swiftly we should be able to apprehend him before too much time passes.” He turned to face Preceptor Ochoba. “Put a second detail around the Grand Master - I don’t want Williams or anyone else taking advantage of the confusion to make another attempt on his life – and then dispatch a couple of squads of men to search the commandery from top to bottom. If he’s here, I want him found.”

Riley shook his head. “If I know Cade, he’s long gone already.”

Ferguson turned to face him. “That’s why I’m sending you to the airport. Keep an eye on the flights to Heathrow and New York and make sure that Williams doesn’t slip out of the country.”

Riley stared at him in surprise. “You want me to case the airport? That’s the last place Cade would go. Without identification he’s not going to get through security and he’s smart enough to realize that he isn’t going to be able to bluff his way onto an aircraft. No, he’s far more likely to drive south, try to cross the border and get to one of the safehouses Echo maintains near the airport. That’s where you need to send me!”

But Ferguson was shaking his head before Riley even finished. “You’ve just sustained a pretty severe blow to the head; I’m not sending you driving across the country quite yet.”

He turned to Johannson. “Contact the London commandery and let them know what’s going on. Have them send some men to the airport to watch the flights out. While their doing that, send another team south to the border. Perhaps we can catch him there before he crosses over.”

The Preceptor nodded in agreement, but wasn’t content to leave it there.

“Edinburgh’s too big for Captain Riley to cover alone, especially if his injury winds up being serious. I’d like a squad of my men to accompany him; we’ll have a much better chance of catching Commander Williams if he heads in that direction if we have more than one pair of eyes watching out for him.”

The last thing Riley wanted was a set of Johannson’s thugs tagging along with him but the Preceptor had phrased his request well. There wasn’t any way for the Seneschal to turn him down without it looking suspicious, so Riley didn’t voice any reservations when Ferguson agreed to the request moments later.

Satisfied that the proper measures had been taken care of, the group dispersed but not before Johannson shot a smug look in Riley’s direction, which he ignored. He would ditch Johannson’s goons at the airport and do what he needed to do, which was find Cade before any of the rest of them did.

Just before walking off, the Seneschal leaned over and said, “There’s a package in my office for you. Be sure to pick it up before you leave for the airport.”

Riley had no idea what package Ferguson was talking about, but he nodded nonetheless. He still thought casing the airport was a poor use of resources, but he’d been wrong before and if that’s where the Seneschal wanted him, that’s where he would go.

He just hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be a colossal waste of time. Something told him they didn’t have too much of that left.

# # #

Two hours after arriving at the Edinburgh airport, Cade was all but ready to admit defeat. He dropped onto one of the cushioned benches in the waiting area and considered his next move.

First he’d spent some time watching the new arrivals, looking for someone of his general size and build who was traveling alone and with whom he might be able trade places, willingly or not, to get through security. But all of those who were a reasonable match were traveling with at least one other individual, some with families even, and trying to take any of their places would be too difficult to pull off.

When he realized Plan A wasn’t going to work he turned his attention to Plan B, which involved sneaking past security into the main concourse and finding a way to board the right aircraft without being seen. The problem was that all of the entrances were watched pretty extensively and he’d have to be dressed like a security agent to stand a chance of slipping thru.

That, of course, prompted the idea to snatch just such an individual when the opportunity presented itself. If he could find a security guard who was alone and roughly the right size, he could steal his uniform and use that to get through the security checkpoint.

It was a good plan except for the fact that the guards didn’t go anywhere alone. They stayed in pairs, from the time they came on shift to the time they went off, even going to the restroom together. It was a far sight more effective than the security in the U.S., Cade noted, much to his disappointment. He watched various targets for more than an hour before giving up.

He wandered over to one of the long, padded benches in the waiting area near the Delta counter and sat down. Cade had been sitting there for only a few minutes when his attention was drawn to a nearby television screen set to CNN.

“...last night. Foster is a former Marine Recon sergeant who recently served two tours in Afghanistan, where he was wounded in a convoy attack.

“This makes the fourth former U.S. soldier abducted while undergoing medical care at a U.S. hospital and the FBI has been called in to help with the investigation. Sources close to the investigation claim that all four of the alleged victims are coma victims, though this has yet to be confirmed by hospital officials.

“Police are asking anyone with information that might help their investigation to call the task force hotline.

“And in other news, the New England Patriots have...”

Cade turned away, having no interest in the Patriots or football in general for that matter. The news report, limited thought it had been, had upset him.

What kind of sick bastard snatches a coma victim right out of the hospital, for heaven’s sake? And a soldier at that? Hadn’t the guy’s family suffered enough already?

He was shaking his head in disgust when a sudden sense of danger nearly overwhelmed him. Never one to ignore his instincts, he looked around as nonchalantly as he could and spotted two men moving through the lobby in his general direction. Both their heads were slowly swiveling back and forth as they walked, searching the crowd around them, clearly looking for someone. He didn’t need to recognize them to know they were from the commandery and that they were looking for him. He was just surprised that there were only two of them.

Cade knew that if he stayed where he was it would only be a matter of moments before he was seen. He had no idea what they would do once they spotted him, but he was certain that a public scene was not going to help his situation. He needed to get all three of them out of sight and then deal with the problem as quickly and quietly as possible.

He got up from his seat and began walking away from the duo, keeping his pace steady and relaxed while surreptitiously looking around him as he went. He found what he was looking for a few moments later.

Satisfied that all was in place for what he had in mind, Cade abruptly stopped walking, forcing those immediately behind him to bump into each other as they sought to avoid running him down. The unexpected commotion drew the attention of those following him and when Cade looked back over his shoulder he found the two men angling toward him, like sharks cutting through a school of minnows.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Cade waited to make eye contact with one of the men who were following him and then, when he had, he quickly crossed the hallway and pushed through the entrance to the Employees Only restroom that he’d chosen for the coming confrontation.

It was a large restroom, as restrooms go, with sinks on one side and a row of six urinals followed by an equal numbers of stalls on the other. He got down on his hands and knees and looked beneath the row of stalls, noting that they were all empty. The sight made him grin; he’d gambled that the employee restroom would be far less frequented than the public one and his gamble had paid off. A little privacy was going to make what was to come much easier.

Cade moved to the fourth stall and slipped inside. Closing the door behind him, he stepped up onto the toilet seat and then squatted down so that his head wouldn’t be visible over the top of the stall.

He was just in time. He heard the door to the bathroom open and then close, followed by the sound of footsteps approaching. For a moment Cade wondered if it might just be a random employee, but then the door to the first stall was kicked in with a bang and he knew his pursuers had taken the bait.

The second stall door went the way of the first and Cade carefully made note of the time that passed between the first and second doors being kicked in. When the third door followed right on schedule, he knew he had them.

He counted it down in his head, then grabbed the side of the stall and lashed out with both legs simultaneously. The stall door slammed open and struck the man on the other side just as he raised his foot to kick it open, taking him completely by surprise. He flew over backward, striking his head on the sink behind him as he went down.

Cade charged out of the stall, ready to continue the attack, only to find his opponent already on the floor unconscious.

One down, he thought.

A glance to his right showed the other man headed in Cade’s direction from where he’d been standing guarding the door. His opponent was younger, stronger, and quite possibly faster than he was, but the former Echo Team commander had the benefit of experience on his side. Never mind the inclination to end this as quickly as possible.

He let the other man close the distance between them and then, at the very last second, dropped below the knife strike aimed at his throat, letting it pass harmlessly over his head as he fell to his knees directly in front of the other man.

It was a move his opponent hadn’t anticipated and as a result it left him momentarily open to counter attack as his brain tried to catch up with what was going on in front of him.

Those split seconds felt like all the time in the world to Cade. He drove his fist upward in a savage upper cut that started near the floor and ended right in the middle of the guy’s groin, twisting his fist sharply as the blow struck in order to deliver as much damage as possible.

The man mewled like a wet kitten and folded over to crash to the floor next to Cade. A sharp blow to the temple to put him out of his misery and it was all over.

The entire fight lasted less than a minute.

Cade climbed to his feet and searched the two unconscious men. He took the money and IDs from their wallets, but left the wallets themselves to make it seem as though the two men had been robbed. He didn’t find any weapons, which was actually a relief; he wouldn’t have felt right leaving them behind but getting caught with them would have been even worse. This way, he didn’t have to worry about it.

He dragged the unconscious men into the handicapped stall at the end of the row and he dumped them in the corner beside the toilet. He locked the stall door and then slipped out beneath it. The men would be immediately obvious if anyone bent over to look into the stall, but he was betting that wouldn’t happen for a little while at least. No one wanted to be caught looking under stalls in an airport restroom, not even the employees.

There was a “Closed for Maintenance” sign standing near the door and he took that with him as he exited the restroom. He shut the door and stood the sign in front of it, then turned to leave...

Only to find Riley standing there waiting for him.

“I’m on your side,” Riley said quickly, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

Cade scowled. “Put your hands down, you idiot, before you attract attention!”

He grabbed Riley’s upper arm and led him around the nearest corner.

“What are you doing here?”

“Saving your ass,” Riley replied, “Again.”

Cade glanced around, making sure no one was paying them any more attention than usual. “I have the situation perfectly under control.”

“Oh, really? So tell me, how were you planning on getting through security? Or getting on a flight, for that matter?”

Cade stared at him but didn’t say anything.

“Right. Just as I thought,” Riley said. He reached into his pocket, took out an envelope, and handed it to Cade. “Here. Take this.”

Cade opened it and poured the contents – a passport and ticket, complete with baggage claim stub – out into his hand.

“Where’d you get these?” he asked, as he opened up the passport and stared at his own picture on the inside. The name on the document – Gerald Swanson – was an alias that he had used for Templar operations in the past.

“Courtesy of the Seneschal. Seems the old man has a soft spot for you. He was the one who told me where Johannson was keeping you.”

Cade nodded, then caught his friend’s gaze. “Look, I’m sorry I hit you. I wasn’t sure...”

Riley waved it off, then pointed at the ticket. “That flight will get you into Heathrow. You’ll have to make arrangements to wherever you’re going from there. The less I know the better, so I’m not even going to ask.”

“You heard about the charges then, I take it?”

“Yes, and before you say anything I know that they’re bullshit. If you stick around to fight them, I’m confident that you’d win, especially with the Seneschal on your side. But something tells me that you aren’t going to do that.”

“I can’t,” Cade said.

“Figured you’d say that.”

Cade shrugged. “The truth is, I don’t have a choice,” he said wearily. “Something’s coming; something really bad. I can feel it down in my very bones. If I don’t rescue Gabrielle soon, it’s going to be too late. I know it.”

Riley shook his head. “What if it’s already too late, man? What then?”

“I have to try. She’s always been there for me, each and every time. She helped us recover the Spear. She got us out of Eden. Hell, she even led us right to the Adversary on the Isle of Sorrows! How could I possibly forsake her now when she needs me the most?”

“You can’t,” Riley said quietly. “I understand that now. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yes, yes you are. And I appreciate that more than you know.”

They were both silent for a moment, thinking about all that had happened to lead them to this point. Cade was suddenly overwhelmed with the sense that he would never seen his friend again. Through all the time they’d known each other, through all the dangers they’d faced together, he’d never been struck with such a feeling before. He found the timing to be unnerving, to say the least, and he shook it off, not wanting the negativity to impact what was ahead of him. He needed his A game and couldn’t allow doubt to creep in.

You’ll both be fine, he told himself.

Riley broke the silence first.

“Three of you walked into that bathroom and only one of you came out. My guess is those two idiots aren’t going to stay unconscious forever, so you’d best get going. And don’t forget to pick up your luggage; it seems you have a friend in the packing department.”

“I owe you, man.”

Echo’s current leader smiled. “That you do. And don’t think I won’t collect.”

The two men embraced and then Cade walked off, headed for the security checkpoint and his flight to London.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The flight from Edinburgh to Heathrow was uneventful. Once in London, Cade was able to secure a ticket on a flight leaving for Venice just thirty minutes after the arrival of his first flight, limiting his time on the ground and thereby limiting his chances of being spotted by any of the Templar patrols that were sure to be roaming the airport. By the time he picked up the duffle bag that Riley had shipped as his luggage, the sun was just starting to slip below the horizon outside.

Cade caught a cab to a small hotel he’d stayed in before along the Canal Della Guidecca. Along the way, he broke the diplomatic seals that allowed the bag to pass through customs unchecked and then unzipped it. Inside were the weapons that had been taken from him at Rosslyn, including his sword case, a fresh set of civilian clothes, and an envelope containing a bundle of one hundred dollar bills plus a few loose twenties.

“Bless you, Riley,” Cade said beneath his breath with a smile. He pulled out a couple of hundreds and the twenties; he’d use the former to pay for the hotel and the latter to square things with the driver when they arrived.

An hour later Cade stepped back out of the hotel having showered, shaved, and changed into the fresh set of clothes Riley had provided. He dumped the old clothes in the trash, but took the rest of his belongings with him. His plan was to get what he needed from the Forsaken One and head back to the States immediately. He was determined not to leave Gabrielle in the the Adversary’s hands.

Of course, he had to find the Forsaken One first.

With his pistol now in a shoulder holster hidden beneath his jacket jacket and his sword stashed in the duffle bag he was carrying, Cade set off down the street in the direction of the canal. There was a line of water taxis waiting at the water’s edge and he started with their operators, looking for one who would be willing to take him to the island of Povelgia.

To a man, they refused.

The first two operators laughed at him for even suggesting it. The third operator claimed that the island was haunted and that Cade was crazy for wanting to go there; no way would he set foot near the place and the same went for his boat. The fourth began cursing at him in Italian the moment he mentioned the island. By the time Cade reached the fifth captain – a short portly fellow with a goatee standing there with cell phone in hand and threatening to call the police - Cade knew it was time to move on.

The situation repeated itself with the next two groups of operators, but at least he found a grizzled old fisherman willing to take him across the lagoon for five hundred dollars American. It was highway robbery, and the old coot knew it too, Cade could tell by the gleam in the man’s eyes, but he would have paid double to get to the island as soon as possible.

As far as Cade was concerned, he was getting the good end of the deal.

The old man took the cash, flipped through it with his thumb, and then grunted in satisfaction. He gestured for Cade to take a seat in the prow of the boat and then fired up the engine with one quick yank on the starter cord. The outboard came to life with a growl like that of a wounded animal and for a moment Cade wondered if he’d made the right choice, but the fisherman’s deft hand at the wheel quickly dispelled the notion.

The night was cool enough that Cade was thankful for the jacket he’d pulled on to hide his shoulder holster. The moon was full, providing plenty of light to steer by, but the confident way the old man handled the tiller told Cade that he could probably have maneuvered every inch of this lagoon while blindfolded.

It was less than a half-mile from Venice to Poveglia, so the trip was over before it felt like it had even begun. As they approached the island from the north, Cade could see the bell tower rising up over the trees, standing watch some said, over cursed ground. There was something unusual looking about the tower and as they drew closer Cade could finally make out what it was; the arched windows on each side of the tower belfry had been bricked shut.

It was from those very windows that the hospital’s chief surgeon had fallen to his death. Cade thought again about the rumors surrounding the incident; about the claims that the ghosts of the dead had pushed him out of one of those windows for his transgressions against the living.

Unlike most people, Cade was well aware of just how much the supernatural world intruded on the living one. Your average skeptic might dismiss the idea of ghosts as nothing more than nonsense, but Cade knew better. He knew how hungry the dead could be. Not only did he consider the theory possible, but if asked he would have said he thought it highly likely, in fact.

After all, he knew from personal experience just how unrelenting the dead could be when you pissed them off.

Cade was expecting the fisherman to take the boat right into shore, but as they came within a hundred yards, he turned west and began running parallel with the shoreline.

“Hey,” Cade shouted, from where he stood in the prow. “What’s wrong with right there?” he asked, pointing.

The fisherman shook his head fervently and shouted back in return. It was hard to hear over the growl of the motor, and Cade’s Italian was rusty, but he thought the old man said something about the campo peste.

Plague field.

It hit him in the next moment, a wave of malevolence that washed out across the water from the shoreline in a thick, cloying haze that made his head pound and his guts churn. He had the sense that a thousand individuals had suddenly turned and glared in his direction and he knew immediately why the locals avoided the place at all costs.

He glanced across at the tangled growth of vegetation stretching out from the shoreline over that part of the island and could imagine the bones of the dead lying there in the plague pit just beneath the soil in a tangled pile sixty, seventy, maybe even eighty feet deep. He knew that if he turned on his Sight he’d be able to see the ghosts of the dead, lined up along that shoreline, watching them as they motored on past.

Cade looked away, before he would be tempted to do so.

The fisherman took them around the west side of the island, to where a canal gave access to a crumbling old dock that stood along the water’s edge near the back of one of the abandoned hospital buildings. The building was covered in scaffolding, but Cade knew that this was more to keep the bricks from injuring anyone breaking the quarantine that was on the island than it was a sign of reconstruction.

Cade could see the church tower rising up behind the building in the moonlight and he couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away as the fisherman brought the boat to a gentle stop beside a decaying set of steps that came down to the water. Something about the tower just drew him to it.

The old man pointed at the steps and said, “Alba.”

Sunrise.

“You’ll meet me here at sunrise?” Cade asked, just to be certain he understood.

The old man nodded.

“Good enough.” Cade grabbed his bag and stepped out of the boat.

The moment he did so a bell rang out in the night air, crisp and clear and loud enough to be heard all the way across the island.

It’s the dead welcoming their own.

Cade shivered. The bell had been removed from the tower many years before.

Apparently the fisherman felt it as well, for a look of fear crossed his face at the sound and he wasted no time in goosing the throttle and getting the hell out of there as fast as the boat would carry him.

Cade found himself wondering if he’d have a ride in the morning or not.

Worry about that later. You have to find the Forsaken One.

He glanced toward the sealed bell tower. Somehow he didn’t think that was going to be as big a problem as he’d originally thought.

Cade knelt down, opened his duffle bag, and removed his sword. He slipped into the harness attached to the scabbard and adjusted it so that the sword rode on his back with the hilt sticking up just over his right shoulder. It was his preferred carry position and made it easy for him to draw. His pistol, an HK Mark 25, already rode in a shoulder holster under his left arm.

Satisfied, he headed out, leaving his bag of clothes and spare cash sitting there on the dock behind him. Somehow, he didn’t think anyone was going to bother it.

He decided to cut through the building in order to reach the bell tower as quickly as possible and soon discovered that nature had long since started to reclaim its territory. Vines and creepers grew throughout the halls and in through holes in the walls and roof. Water stains and the smell of mold were prominent, but here and there he could see evidence – a section of mosaic tile on the floor, a scrap of colored paint on the walls - of what the place must have looked like back in its heyday.

Here and there he found an abandoned piece of equipment, most of which were so covered by vines and creepers that it was often hard for him to recognize them for what they actually were. The same held true for the stark, institutional pieces of furniture he found in some of the rooms; straight-backed steel chairs, bed frames from which the mattresses had long since been stolen or rotted away.

In many of the rooms he felt the fleeting presence of the dead, both ancient and modern. He caught a glimpse of them from time to time, will-o-the-wisps of shadow that shifted about in the corners of rooms he passed or slipped around the corner just ahead, gone again when he reached that place. A few times he passed a room where something darker lay slumbering and he made sure to hurry past without disturbing whatever it was.

By the time he reached the exit at the far end of the structure and stepped out into the courtyard leading to the church, Cade was more than happy to leave the building behind.

The entrance to the church lay just ahead and he walked over to it without hesitation. He found the door unlocked when he tugged on it and he slipped inside. Finding the narrow entrance to the clock tower stairwell, he headed up them at a brisk pace, knowing that what he’d come here for was close at hand and getting closer by the minute.

As he neared the top he could see a faint silvery light shining down the steps from the doorway above.

It looked a lot like moonlight to him.

He’d seen the bricked-up windows on his approach to the island and that made him pause. Those he’d seen looked intact, but he supposed one or another could have fallen victim to the weather or shoddy craftsmanship and was allowing some of the light to filter in from outside.

Or that light was something else entirely.

Only one way to find out.

Cade made his way up the last few remaining steps and looked into the room just beyond from the darkness of the stairwell landing.

What he saw made him nearly gasp in surprise.

The bricked-up windows had been nothing more than illusion. Moonlight streamed in through their open faces, illuminating a tall individual in a dark hooded robe standing before an easel on the far side of the room painting with the help of that very light. From where he stood, Cade had a decent look at the image on the stranger’s canvas and he felt his blood run cold when he realized that it was a portrait of his own face.

The painter spoke up without looking away from his canvas.

“So like a Templar, always skulking in the shadows.”

The comment, and the tone, irritated Cade, but he reminded himself to keep cool as he stepped out into the light. This thing, whatever it truly was, had decimated squads of Templars without even trying. Cade was good, but not good enough to take it on by himself and win. He needed to manage this with a little bit of finesse.

“You know who I am.” He made the statement a fact, rather than a question.

That hooded head turned in his direction, but the shadows made it impossible for Cade to see inside of it. The voice sounded human enough, but he knew that was no guarantee of anything.

“Sniper and decorated police officer. Templar Knight Commander. Husband. Sworn adversary of the angel Asharael.” There was a hint of amusement in its tone now. “Oh yes, I know all about you, Cade Williams.”

“If you know me, then you know why I have come.”

The painter didn’t bother to look up from its canvas.

“You don’t have it in you to do what must be done. Leave this place and let events fall where they may.”

Cade shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Won’t.”

Cade stepped into the room, doing what he could to dispel the growing sense of unease he was feeling in the stranger’s presence, and glanced around as he did so. Paintings and sketches of all shapes and sizes lined the walls and Cade was horrified to see that each and every one of them featured either himself or his wife, Gabrielle. A painting of Cade fighting zombies lurching up from the water amidst a submerged Louisiana swamp stood beside a sketch of Gabrielle as a Ferryman at the prow of a skiff on the Sea of Lamentations. A charcoal rub of the angel Baraquel looming over Riley and Cade in the Eden facility partially concealed a study of Gabrielle as she appeared in the Brooklyn warehouse just a few weeks earlier. Each image was a scene lifted right out of the events of their lives the past few years.

Cade slowly turned in place, taking it all in, and he felt his calm reason slowly being replaced by anger. This thing, whatever it was, had not just been watching events play out on the world stage, as the Seneschal’s journal had indicated, but it had specifically been observing Gabrielle and him.

For quite literally years.

“Why are you watching me? Watching us?”

It came out a little harsher than he expected, but that couldn’t be helped. Cade had never expected to find that the Watcher he’d come to confront would be involved in watching him!

He whirled around, pinning the Forsaken One with his gaze. “What the hell is going on here?!”

The painter ignored him, dabbing more paint on the canvass in front of him.

Cade didn’t like the connections he was drawing in his mind. The Forsaken One knew of his wife’s situation, knew of the feud, for lack of better words, between him and the Adversary, knew even of the abilities that he had kept hidden from all but a chosen few. All that knowledge no doubt meant that he knew as much about the Adversary as well. In this he had all but told Cade to go home, that there was nothing that he could say or do that would help Cade in his quest to free Gabrielle.

Cade didn’t believe that.

Couldn’t believe that.

And the Forsaken One’s unwillingness to cooperate was starting to piss him off.

In that moment his anger got the better of him.

“You will speak to me, demon!” Cade shouted, his hand going to the hilt of his sword.

That hooded face turned and looked at him, freezing him with a glance. Cade tried to move his hand, tried to draw the sword within his grasp in order to protect himself from the creature’s wrath, only to find his arm frozen in place.

His fear jumped up several notches at a go.

How do you fight a creature with power like that?

The Forsaken One stared at him a moment.

“Is that what you think I am? A demon?”

The laugh that followed was bitter and dark, made all the more unnerving as it issued from that hidden face.

“I am amazed that you have lived so long knowing so little of the things you hunt, Templar. I could destroy you, here and now, with just a glance and yet you insult me with names and threaten me with your puny excuse for a weapon. Are you really so blind?”

“If I am blind, enlighten me,” Cade replied, unable to do anything else. “Prove to me that you are not what I say.”

For a moment, Cade didn’t think it – he? – was going to reply. The Forsaken One added another few strokes to its masterpiece, seemingly indifferent to what Cade said, and Cade had a momentary vision of being stuck in this room forever, trapped with one hand reaching for his weapon, while the bastard in front of him dabbed at its canvas with its brightly colored paints.

When the explosion came, it caught Cade entirely off guard. The palette of paints was flung across the room while the Forsaken One used the brush in its hand like a knife, slashing the canvas into ragged strips with lightning fast movements. One minute it was on the other side of the room, the next the Forsaken One was looming over him with a furious expression on his face.

“Prove to you?” it yelled and it seemed the very walls of the tower around them shook with the sound. “By what measure should I have to prove anything to you?”

The creature’s anger seemed to have caused it to lose its hold on him, for Cade found that he could move once more. But there was nowhere for him to go and he knew that if he dared to try and draw his weapon the thing looming over him would more than likely strike him down before he managed to get even a single inch of his blade free of its sheath. So instead he stood perfectly still, staring up into the square-jawed masculine face that he could now see inside the hood; a face that was human and yet not, a face that was perfectly proportioned in every way, so much so that it appeared almost alien in its perfection, and braced himself for what was to come.

“I was old before time began, before your ragged race took their first step on this waste of a Creation, and I will be here long after you and your kind are gone!

“I have soared over the Deep and stood shoulder to shoulder with my brethren as the rebellion caught fire and set the world alight!”

With each declaration the Forsaken One seemed to grow taller, larger. His voice gained power, too, until it was thundering in the enclosed space.

“I claim Michael, Gabriel, and Rapheal as my brothers; Raguel, Remiel and Saraquel as my sisters!

“I am the watcher in the dark, the chronicler of the ages, the beacon of light in the sea of confusion. I am the savior of prophets, the keeper of the truth, and the slayer of the chosen!

“I am Uriel, the Forsaken One!”

With that final declaration, he reached up and tore his robe to the waist, revealing himself to Cade.

He had dark hair and dark eyes to go with that symmetrical face, plus a body honed and hardened by years of conflict and training. His skin was the color of burnt sienna, but Cade almost didn’t notice because his attention was entirely captured by the tattoos that covered every square inch of exposed flesh that he could see; from the base of Uriel’s neck down to his stomach and continuing lower beneath his robe it looked like.

The tattoos twisted and moved and roamed about on his flesh like living breathing creations with a life all their own. Images rose to prominence as a scene played out Cade’s eyes and then fell into the background again as another took its place. Each of them were different than the one before and it didn’t take long for Cade to realize that he was watching events from the past, present, and quite possibly the future play out in an endless sequence on Uriel’s flesh.

Entranced, Cade reached out with one hand, only to draw it back before touching the other man when he realized what he was about to do. The sheer artistry of it all was enthralling, even when the scenes of light and beauty shifted to those of horror and war and suffering. Cade found himself slowly following the images as they moved from Uriel’s chest to his side and around to his back...

Then Cade stopped short.

The shocking ruin of Uriel’s back told another story entirely.

Two ragged clumps of tissue rose a few inches above the point where a human’s shoulder blades would be, all that remained of his once majestic wings, and those clumps still oozed black rivulets of blood that meandered down the angel’s lower back in tiny rivers of pain. The flesh surrounding the stubs was laced with old scars that marked where the blade had hacked and sliced at his flesh and Cade nearly recoiled in horror and empathy at the sight.

But there was a story here as well, in the ruin of that once glorious form, a story that Cade instinctively knew that he was supposed to witness, to see, and so he continued his circle around the angel until he returned to the place where he had started.

“And now, perhaps, you understand,” Uriel said quietly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Uriel the archangel.

He is mentioned several times in the Christian Apocrypha, particularly the books of Enoch and Esdras, as one of the seven hosts who guarded the throne of heaven. Tradition held that he was the angel that had checked the doors of the Jews for lamb’s blood during the Passover plague in Egypt and the one that carried John the Baptist and his mother, Elizabeth, to join the holy family after their flight out of Egypt. Uriel was noted as being as pitiless as a demon in the Apocalypse of Peter, another extra-biblical text, and in the Life of Adam and Eve he is listed as the angel that helped to bury both Adam and Abel in Paradise.

Perhaps more importantly, given Cade’s current needs, Uriel was historically regarded as the angel of wisdom, the one who shines the light of God’s truth into the darkness. All that he had seen, all that he had witnessed, both the sublime and the horrendous, had been recorded on his flesh and transformed into a living collection of knowledge. It was from that collection that the angel drew the endless supply of wisdom that the angel was traditionally believed to dispense.

But Uriel was not the angel he had once been, that was clear. An angel’s power rested in his wings and Uriel had been stripped of those, either purposely or through an injury. As a result he had been reduced from a being of almost limitless power to something much less. He was still vastly more powerful than Cade, as he had so aptly illustrated already, but he was far from what he had once been.

All this flashed through Cade’s mind in an instant and he realized that he did, in fact, understand.

At some point in the distant past, Uriel had retreated from the fight. He’d left the battle between good and evil to those still equipped to carry it forth and had retreated into the shadows, to bear witness and record the conflict for future generations.

But what got Cade excited was the understanding that Uriel was a senior member of the heavenly host and by his own admission had been around since before the Fall. He had called the Adversary by name, which meant he had most likely known the fallen angel personally. There probably wasn’t anyone else on the planet – aside from the Adversary himself – who could tell Cade what he needed to know to rescue his wife.

And you’ve gone and pissed Uriel off.

Nice job, Williams.

Cade bowed his head briefly in a gesture of respect and then looked up again, meeting the angel’s stare.

“My apologies; I meant no disrespect. Perhaps we could start over?”

Uriel sighed and turned away, walking over to the nearest window to stare out into the night. Over his shoulder, he said, “You cannot save Gabrielle; you can only set her free.”

Set her free?

Cade didn’t like the sound of that.

“What does that mean?” he asked, a bit more harshly than he intended as his heart rate kicked up.

Get a grip, man.

Uriel either didn’t notice or chose to ignore his tone.

“Asharael began altering your wife’s body the moment he took control of it, bending and morphing it to his will. That kind of physical change comes at a terrible price. It is only his presence within her flesh that is keeping the damage he has caused from crippling her or killing her outright. He can keep her body alive indefinitely in this fashion. If you remove that protection, however...”

Cade stared at him, unhappy with what he was hearing.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, pointing a finger in Uriel’s direction, “you’re telling me that if I succeed in freeing Gabrielle from the Adversary’s control, she’ll die?”

Uriel nodded. “Yes. Probably within seconds and in a very grisly fashion.”

Cade shook his head. “No. No, that can’t be right. There has to be a way!”

“Believe me when I tell you that there is not.”

All the fear and pain and despair that he’d been harboring for the last few weeks came pouring up from deep inside and Cade suddenly lost it. Within moments he was hollering at the angel standing in front of him.

“Fuck you!” he yelled as he paced back and forth in front of Uriel. “Just fuck you! What the hell do you know, anyway? You’re just some sorry sack of shit with his wings ripped off! I know there’s a way; there has to be!”

Uriel didn’t say anything; he just stood there and calmly watched Cade pace back and forth while shaking his fist in the angel’s direction.

“No, you’re wrong. You have to be wrong. There’s no way I’m letting that bastard do this. No fucking way!”

“You have to.”

The declaration brought Cade up short. He spun around to face the crippled angel, anger on his face.

“What did you just say?”

Uriel met his gaze calmly. “You have to let Asharael win. He must remain in possession of your wife’s body.”

“Like hell he will!”

Cade was quickly becoming convinced that this was a complete waste of time. Uriel had clearly spent too much time locked away from the world in this tower to know what needed to be done. Cade had to get out of here, get back to the mainland, and from there he could...

“This is not a question of choice,” Uriel said to him, capturing Cade’s attention with the hard, relentless tone in his voice. “You let the Adversary escape twice before but you cannot do so a third time. He has been preparing to return his entire scream of angels to this plane and if that happens – if he is united with his former allies – there will be no end to the suffering they will cause.”

It took everything Cade had not to laugh. “You don’t seem to get it,” he said. “The world can go to hell for all I care. I’m done with trying to do the right thing. All I want to do is rescue my wife; she’s been suffering at that bastard’s hands long enough!”

Uriel stepped closer. “No,” he said, with a tang of steel in his voice, “it is you who do not seem to get it.”

Without warning, he reached out and grabbed Cade’s arm.

One moment Cade was standing in the clock tower arguing with the injured angel, the next the two of them were standing on an ash-strewn plain staring out at the remains of a bombed-out city in the distance. Most of the buildings had been reduced to nothing more than piles of rubble, but a single tower with a large clock on it rose defiantly through the twisting, churning smoke that seemed to be drifting everywhere. Something about the tower looked familiar, but it took Cade several minutes of staring at it before he recognized it as Big Ben.

If that is Big Ben, he thought, that meant the city he was looking at, the one that looked more like an apocalyptic wasteland than a city, was London.

Cade gazed around in disbelief.

What the hell had happened here?

Before he could ask, his attention was drawn to a ragtag group of survivors making their way across the plain before them. They were picking their way through the rubble, occasionally glancing upward into the haze-filled sky above. Cade counted two men, three women, and a small child. He turned a questioning look in Uriel’s direction, but the angel kept watching the tableau before them and Cade turned back to do the same.

He was just in time.

One minute the group before them was fine and the next a shadow swept over them from the clouds above, so fast that Cade nearly missed it, and when it was gone the bodies of the two men lay in the dust, blood spurting from the stumps of their necks where their heads used to be.

The women scattered, running pell-mell away from the bodies of their companions as fast as their feet would carry them across the broken terrain. They ran in silence, though Cade could feel the screams that threatened to burst from their lips as if they were his own. Not once did they look up, which Cade found odd, until he realized that if they did they risked breaking an ankle or falling due to the uneven ground beneath their feet.

Cade wasn’t sure if he’d have the discipline to do that, knowing that death rode the air currents somewhere above them.

The child? Where’s the child? he thought suddenly.

He scanned the landscape before him. At first he thought she must have fallen in the initial attack, like the two men, but then he saw her, crouched in the shadows between two large pieces of cement near one of the bodies, like a rabbit trying to hide in a shallow bundle.

She was a sitting duck. If that thing came back it would snatch her from her hidey-hole in an instant.

He started forward, intending to pull her free and protect her if it came to that, only to find he couldn’t move; Uriel’s iron grip on his arm prevented him from moving.

“Let go! I’ve got to help her!”

Uriel didn’t even look at him as he said, “You are not really here; there is nothing you can do but bear witness to what is to come. Besides, she is not the one in danger. Watch and learn!”

Confused, Cade turned back to the scene before him and was just in time to see a large, hulking shape land in front of one of the women, its large leathery wings stirring up dust as they pounded the air around it. It stood on backward jointed legs that seemed too thin to support its enormous weight and it towered over the woman, at least eight feet tall if it was an inch. An enormous mouth filled most of its face and large, batlike ears jutted from the sides of its head.

The woman screamed at the sight and turned to go, but the creature’s hands shot out and grabbed her around her upper arms, dragging her closer. The hideous head dipped and Cade could only stand and watch in horror as the creature bit into the flesh of the woman’s forehead and then yanked it’s head downward, tearing the flesh right off its victim’s skull.

The creature dropped the woman’s twitching form at its feet as it stared directly at Cade and sucked that hanging flap of skin up into its mouth like a candied treat. Then it bent to take another bite.

Cade opened his mouth to scream in defiance but the world tipped sideways before he could give voice to his cry and he found himself standing back in the small room at the top of the bell tower next to Uriel.

He yanked his arm free from the other’s grip and stepped away from the wingless angel, visibly shaken. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to rid them of the sight of that freak-show escapee tearing the flesh from that woman’s face.

After a moment, when he’d swallowed the rising tide of gore in his throat and had calmed down enough to speak, he asked, “What the hell was that?”

Uriel was silent for a moment and then said, “That was Kabaiel, one of the seven in Asharael’s scream, in the reworked body of the human host selected for him.”

“Selected? By whom?”

“Asharael. The one you know as the Adversary.”

“Is that what he’ll do to Gabrielle?” Cade asked.

Uriel didn’t even try to soften the blow.

“Yes. She is strong and might last longer than most, but eventually Asharael’s nature will surface and her flesh will be permanently remade in his image.”

Cade shuddered at the thought. After seeing what he’d just seen, he wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy.

“And London? What happened to the city?”

“If Asharael succeeds in bringing his scream back into bodily form, it won’t be long before they will regain the full scope of their former powers. They will turn man against man, nation against nation, until civilization as we know it will destroy itself and from the ashes seven new kingdoms will rise, kingdoms ruled by the Fallen. The scene you witnessed will repeat itself thousands of times over until the human race is all but decimated.”

Uriel paused for a moment, and then said, “Unless, of course, you do what needs to done.”

“You said Asharael must remain in possession of Gabrielle’s body. Why in heaven’s name would I let him do that if that’s what’s going to happen?”

“Because Asharael is vulnerable while he is trapped inside her form.”

“Vulnerable?”

“Yes. With the right weapons he can be killed. Permanently. Not just banished and driven back to the Infernal Realm, the way he was when you confronted him on the Isle of Sorrows, but actually destroyed.”

Cade could read between the lines as well as anyone else.

“But doing so would kill Gabrielle.”

“Yes,” Uriel said, without hesitation, “it would.”

Cade’s thoughts reeled and he felt like he was teetering on the brink of a long fall. What Uriel was asking was...madness. There was no other way to describe it. He’d spent years trying to save his wife and now, when he thought he was closer than he had ever been, he learned that it had all been an illusion? That he had waited too long to act and that the chance had been missed? It couldn’t be!

And yet...and yet deep in his soul he knew that it was. He didn’t doubt for a moment that the angel was telling him the truth. Uriel was suggesting that what he had witnessed would play itself out again over and over in every nation across the globe. He couldn’t bear the responsibility for that any more than he could take up that knife and slay his wife.

What the hell was he going to do?

Uriel went on.

“When the fallen have possessed a human form, there is a period when they haven’t gained complete control and the possession grounds it to this material plane, making it vulnerable to destruction.

“Ordinary weapons will not do the trick, though, as your brethren discovered when they tried to kill the Adversary that night on the bridge. Earthly weapons will wound it, but not destroy it outright. To do that, you need a soul blade.”

“A what?”

“A soul blade.”

Cade had had enough. “What the fuck is a soul blade?”

Uriel sighed; Cade didn’t know if it was over his language or his ignorance.

Probably both.

“In the early days of the Great War, shortly after the Son of the Morning had rebelled and my brethren were forced to choose sides in the conflict, there was a mighty battle unlike any that has been seen since. Waves of angels ranged back and forth across the sky and the damage they wrought was terrible to behold as the battle raged for many days and nights.

“In the midst of that battle my brother, Gabriel, was terribly wounded and fell, tumbling out of the sky to land amidst a group of humans. He did not fall alone, however; four of his enemies pursued him, searching the area where he had fallen in an attempt to find and finish him off.”

Uriel’s gaze turned distant, as if he were reliving it all over again.

“To Gabriel’s surprise, the humans among whom he’d fallen did not leave him to the mercy of his enemies, who were far stronger and more powerful than they, but instead stood shoulder to shoulder before him, fighting on his behalf.”

“Understand, they did not need to do so. This was not their battle, not their fight. They owed him nothing – if anything, they had reason to fear him for he had slain many of their number when the Almighty demanded it – but they stood anyway.”

Uriel snapped out of his reverie and looked at Cade with fire in his eyes.

“Stood and died. One after another, until not a single one of them remained standing. But their sacrifice was not in vain; it gave my brother the time he needed to gather his strength anew. When he stood to face his enemies, he had the strength he needed to vanquish them and emerge victorious.”

Cade shifted impatiently, but Uriel didn’t appear to notice.

“Gabriel refused to let their bravery go unrewarded. He lived among them, teaching them, loving them. As his dedication to them grew, he came to understand a terrible truth. The enemy would never forgive the humans he had befriended for interfering in a fight that was not their own. He had, in fact, made things worse by staying among them. They would become pawns in the battle between good and evil, hounded and hunted, and the realization filled him with sorrow. He could not leave them unprotected.

“His sword had been damaged in that original battle and so, when he thought they were ready, he gave the shards to them, showed them how to melt them down into weapons unlike any they had ever seen before. Seven blades of power forged in the heart of an angel’s sorrow.

“Over time those blades would pass from culture to culture and be known by many names. But I have always known them by their original name, Gabriel’s Tears.”

“Three have been lost to history. Two are controlled by the demon Abromolech in his warrens deep beneath the city of Moscow. One rests in the hands of an enigmatic individual known as the Preacher, but why he wants it or what he intends to do with it, I don’t know.”

Cade frowned. “That’s only six. I thought you said there were seven.”

Uriel looked over at him with a smirk. “Will wonders never cease? A Templar who can count.”

Cade was still trying to figure out if the dour angel had just made a joke when Uriel launched himself upward into the darkness above them with one powerful thrust of his legs. Cade rushed to the center of the room, looking upward, afraid that Uriel was about to disappear out the roof or something, and was relieved when he saw the angel rummaging about on a platform built at the apex of the tower, where the church’s bell had once been suspended. After a moment, the angel found what he was looking for and dropped gently back down beside Cade.

In his hands was a dagger with a simple, unadorned hilt. The blade looked uneven, the kind of thing hammered out by a student rather than a master blacksmith. It looked old, old and fragile, and Cade couldn’t imagine taking on a training dummy with that thing never mind an angel like the one he’d seen in the vision.

Uriel looked at it with reverence. “The last of Gabriel’s Tears.”

Cade shook his head in disgust. “You’re kidding, right? That’s what you want me to take on the Adversary with?”

Uriel, however, was unfazed. He looked down at the weapon he held, turning it over in his hands.

“Haven’t you ever wondered why the Adversary chose your house to invade?” he asked. “Why he picked your family to torment?”

Cade glanced at him in irritation. Of course, he had. It was a question he’d been asking himself over and over again for years. Some time ago he’d come to the conclusion that it was because he’d been assigned to the task force charged with capturing the serial killer known as the Dorchester Demon, which was the human host that the Adversary had been hiding in at that time. Still, that answer had always felt too pat for him. There were at least forty other officers from a variety of agencies assigned to that task force and at least half of them lived within the killer’s hunting grounds, just as Cade and his wife had. The Adversary could have chosen any one of them.

But he hadn’t.

He’d chosen Cade.

“What the hell does that have to do...”

His sentence trailed off, unfinished.

“You know, don’t you?” he said softly.

“It was not chance or fate or bad luck that brought the Adversary to your door,” Uriel told him. “He came there deliberately, because he knew what you do not.

“He came to kill you, because you have angel blood flowing in your veins and it is that very same blood that will allow you to wield one of the Tears against him.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Cade laughed; he couldn’t help it. The notion was completely absurd.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Am I cousins with the tooth fairy, too?”

Uriel looked at him with something that Cade suspected might just be pity and that wasn’t a pleasant notion.

“Tell me, Commander Williams. Where do you think you’re gifts came from?”

“My gifts?”

Cade was starting to feel like the student at the back of the class, always several steps behind everyone else.

“Yes, your gifts,” Uriel said, with a touch of impatience. “Wait, I know. You probably think those came from the Adversary, don’t you? That he did something to you, something that changed you, cursed you, made you into something that isn’t quite human?”

Uriel was correct; Cade had, indeed, thought that very thing. One of the reasons that he hadn’t stopped the men calling him the Heretic when he’d first heard the nickname so long ago was because he half-believed it himself. Nothing human should be able to do what he could do. He’d decided after being released from the hospital that he’d put those abilities to use in tracking down the Adversary and he’d done just that. He thought of them as useful tools, yes, but tools with a taint about them that tainted him as well.

“You’ve witnessed the results of other attacks by the Adversary. Seen the results first hand. You’ve studied every encounter with Ahsharael that can be found in the Order’s records and several dozen more in various archives across the country. I would be prepared to say that no detail escaped you.”

“So? What’s your point?” Cade asked.

“In all that time, in all those records, did you ever once come upon another encounter in which the Adversary granted strange and unique gifts to the individual he’d tried to kill?”

Cade shook his head. “No.”

“So what makes you think it happened to you?”

The question hit him right between the eyes. So simple and yet so profound. Cade found himself at a loss for words; he didn’t have anything even remotely resembling an answer for Uriel’s question. He’d always just assumed his powers had come from the Adversary, a side effect of the demon’s attempt to kill him. He’d fixated on that answer early on and had simply run with it.

Because, really, what else was he supposed to believe? He’d had a hard enough time as it was back then, finding ways of dealing with Gabrielle’s death and his own injuries, never mind coping with the realization that there really were things out there in the darkness just waiting for the chance to swallow mankind whole. He’d nearly broken from the mental weight of it all and it was only when he’d finally found the Order that he’d begun to make some sense of it all, to find some purpose in going forward.

He looked up and met Uriel’s gaze and in that moment he had the sudden sense that everything about him was being stripped bare, that his thoughts, his emotions, his every wish and desire was being pulled out and laid forth for examination, that the creature in front of him was weighing each and every thing he’d ever done in order to determine if he was worthy of hearing the truth.

To his surprise, it was important to him that he not be found wanting.

“So where did they come from?” he asked. “My...gifts, as you call them.”

“You know the legend of the Nephilim?”

Cade nodded, then quoted from memory.

“And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.’”

The verses came from the Book of Enoch and according to that ancient text the children that resulted from the union between men and angels were known as the Nephilim, meaning “giants” or “those who have fallen.” Cade had been studying angelology for years; the story of the Nephilim was familiar ground.

Uriel nodded. “The majority of the Nephilim were destroyed in the great flood, as were the watchers that begat them. But some of their offspring – the Elioud – survived. The blood that ran in their veins, while far from pure, still bore the stamp of the divine. Some knew of their heritage and tried to keep the old ways alive, but most did not. As the centuries passed the knowledge of where and what they had come from was lost and soon the Elioud were no more than a legend. Like their forefathers before them, they were relegated to the pages of texts branded heretical by the religious leaders of that day and age and, ultimately, forgotten by all but a few scholars.

“The Adversary did not forget, however. He knew full well the power that lay slumbering in the veins of those descended from the Elioud and he spent years tracking them down, one by one. Some he would corrupt, like the man you knew as Simon Logan, while others were simply slaughtered outright. Until, at last, his search for the offspring of the Elioud brought him to your door. Your abilities have always been there; the Adversary’s attack was simply the catalyst that brought them out of dormancy and allowed you to make use of them.”

At first it sounded crazy, sure, but the more Cade thought about it the more it made an odd kind of sense. And really, was it any more fanciful than the other things he’d come to take for granted over the years? Demons and witches and ghosts, never mind sorcerers and black magick? He’d seen more than his fair share of unearthly things since joining the Order and hadn’t doubted any of them. What made this one so different?

Nothing, except that this one was about him.

Uriel was standing there, extending the dagger toward him, hilt first. Almost against his better judgment, Cade reached out and took it.

It was heavier than he expected, much heavier, and once in his hand it seemed to lose that sense of fragility that had surrounded it only moments before. The blade gleamed hungrily and he could almost imagine that it had a life of its own.

He hefted it in his hand; it was a good, solid weapon, one that would work quite nicely in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, to use it, he was going to have to get up close and personal.

“Okay,” Cade said. “For the sake of argument, let’s say I believe you. Let’s say I take this thing with me when I confront the Adversary. What then?”

Uriel smiled and the sight was so disquieting that Cade took a step back.

“You must either slash the Adversary’s throat or plunge the knife into its heart,” the angel told him. “Once the demon’s blood comes in contact with the blade, the power inherent in the Tear will do all the rest.”

“The demon’s blood? You mean Gabrielle’s, don’t you?”

Uriel gave him that pitying look once again. “At this point, Templar, they are one and the same.”

“But...”

The angel cut him off. “No,” he said. “There is no more time for questions. I have told you all that I can tell you, have shown you the consequences if you do not do what needs to be done. The rest is up to you.”

With those words the angel turned away and would speak no more no matter how hard Cade begged him to do so. Eventually, after several minutes of trying, Cade finally gave up. He’d learned all he was going to learn, it seemed. It was time to get on with it.

He left the tower the same way he came in, noticing as he did so that he had apparently been inside longer than he expected for the sun was just coming up over the horizon. Cade slipped the dagger through his belt and then pulled his jacket down over it before going down to the docks to await the fisherman’s arrival.

# # #

After Williams left the island, Uriel turned to a seemingly empty corner of the bell tower and said, “I know you are there. You can come out now.”

The air in the corner shimmered like the haze rising off a hot desert highway, revealing the form of Seneschal Ferguson standing there. As he crossed the bell tower toward Uriel, the features of his face began to shift and change until he looked like an entirely different individual. Had Williams remained in the room, he would have recognized him as the leader of the scream of angels that had appeared to him after Echo’s defeat of Baraquel deep within the walls of the Eden facility, the same angel that had given him the feather that allowed him to track the Adversary across the Sea of Lamentations to the Isle of Sorrows.

This time, though, he looked worried.

“Did he accept the dagger?”

Uriel nodded.

“And he knows what to do with it?”

Another nod.

A longer pause, and then the newcomer asked another question.

“Is he ready to do what needs to be done?”

Uriel turned and looked at his visitor. For a long moment he said nothing, and then he turned and looked out the window to where Cade was making his way back across the lagoon in the prow of the fisherman’s boat.

“Of course he’s ready,” Uriel answered. “He has my blood in his veins.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

After sending Cade on his way to Heathrow, Riley reported in to Preceptor Johannson, claiming that he hadn’t seen Commander Williams. He was ordered to catch the next flight back to the United States. Luckily, there’d been one headed to JFK in New York within the hour.

Thanks to the time change, he arrived in New York just before midnight and used one of the vehicles the Templars kept in long-term parking to return to the commandery in Westport, CT. Once back in his quarters, he collapsed on the bed and fell quickly asleep.

He awoke a few hours later to the sound of his cell phone.

“Riley here,” he said, once he’d fumbled it out of his pocket and put it to his ear.

“Where are you?”

Recognizing Cade’s voice, Riley said, “My quarters. Ravensgate. Why? What did you find out?”

Cade ignored both questions. “Stay where you are,” he said, instead. “I’ll be right with you.”

Right with me? How the hell was he...

There was a crash of glass from inside his bathroom and then the door opened and Cade stepped out, brushing glass shards off his shoulder. He was dressed in the clothes Riley had given to him at the airport and looked like he hadn’t slept since, but there was a manic light in his eyes that he only got when he was on the trail of something good.

“How on earth...?” Riley asked.

Cade grinned. “Yeah, pretty cool, huh?”

“Cool? That’s what you’re calling it?”

Riley was flabbergasted at what had just happened. Cade had never been able to control his passage through the Beyond before, he knew. Traveling that way had always been a bit of Russian roulette; step through the mirror and hope you ended up somewhere reasonably close to where you wanted to be. What Cade had done was the equivalent of trading a catapult throw for a laser guided nuclear missile.

“Learned a trick or two over the last couple of weeks,” Cade told him. “But forget about that. I’ve got something better. I know what the Adversary is up to!”

That caught Riley’s attention. He gestured that Cade should take a seat at the small table that served as his work area but Cade was too hyped up to sit. He paced back and forth while Riley took the chair instead.

“You’ve heard about the soldiers being kidnapped?”

Riley nodded. He hadn’t paid too much attention to the news reports, but he was at least aware of them. One missing soldier had been bad enough, with now with five of them missing, the situation was getting plenty of news coverage.

“All former US soldiers. All in top condition before whatever injury landed them in a coma. All of them with little to no brain activity and existing on life support.”

“Sounds like they’d be useless to the Adversary,” Riley said. “What am I missing?”

“They’re just the opposite, actually. They’re perfect for what the Adversary has in mind.”

Cade explained about meeting the Forsaken One and what he’d learned about the Adversary’s plans to bring back his scream as a result.

“He’s going to call the other members of his scream out of the infernal plane and give them the bodies of the kidnapped victims as vessels to inhabit on this one. Once he does, it won’t take the fallen angels long to assume control of their new forms, just as the Adversary did with Gabrielle.”

While Cade talked, Riley used his computer to pull up information on the kidnappings. Scanning it, he said, “Each of the victims were considered to be all but brain dead; in several of the cases, the doctors were just waiting for the family to give the word to take them off life support.”

“Right. Without an active intelligence to fight, it will be easy for the fallen angels to take over the bodies and make them their own. And if that happens, we’re in for a world of hurt.”

Riley looked up. “Define ‘world of hurt.’”

“Biblical-style-cataclysms-right-out-of-the-Book-of-Revelation-with-the-world-divided-up-between-seven-fallen-angels-as-their-personal-hunting-ground world of hurt.”

Riley knew Cade wasn’t joking; he never joked about things like that.

Taking a deep breath, he said, “Right. Just another day at the office then. So how do we stop this bastard?”

“With this.” Cade pulled the dagger out of his belt and laid it on the table in front of Riley.

Always leery of touching artifacts that he knew nothing about, Riley left it right where it was. “What is it?”

Cade reiterated what he’d learned from Uriel.

Riley stared at it for a moment, then looked up at Cade, the question he was about to ask written all over his face even before he said it.

“You’ll kill Gabrielle if you use this thing. You know that, right?”

Cade winced and put the knife away again. “I’m hoping it won’t come to that. Uriel said that I have to draw blood; he didn’t say how much.”

Riley didn’t say anything for a moment and the hesitation told Cade he was unconvinced. “Don’t worry about that right now. I’ll figure it out when the time comes. Trust me.”

His former teammate held up his hands in surrender. “No argument here. We still have to find the SOB, unless you’ve figured that out, too?”

“No, but I think I know how we can do so. I need a list of patients injured in the last, say three months, who are currently in a coma on life support. Can you do that?”

“Sure. Give me ten minutes.”

“Olsen could have done it in three.”

“True, but I’m not Olsen. You’re going to have to live with ten.”

In the end, it only took him seven minutes. His triumphant smile quickly disappeared when he realized that the search turned up hundreds of patients, far too many for the list to be useful to them.

“No, we’re good,” Cade told him. “The hospital records will indicate if the patients were or are currently members of the armed services, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. The kidnapping victims were all soldiers, so we can expect the next two to be the same. Cull the list and eliminate everyone who isn’t one.”

Riley did so, giving them a list with just over 150 names.

“Still too big,” Cade said, “but at least we’re getting there.”

They sat together in silence for a moment, thinking, and then Riley began tapping away on the keyboard again.

“How long does it take for the muscles of coma patients to start to atrophy?” Riley asked. “A few weeks?”

“Depends upon the shape they were in before the accident, I suspect. I’d guess a few weeks before you’d see significant problems.”

Riley typed another search string into the computer. “They aren’t going to want to take up residence in bodies that are weak from lack of use, right? So they’ll be targeting the most recent cases. If we narrow our search to those injured in the last few weeks...”

The computer spit out a list of fifteen names. A quick check confirmed Riley’s hypothesis; all of the previous victim’s names were on the list.

Cade clapped him on the back. “Well done!”

Riley shook his head. “We narrowed it down, but we’ve still got nine different candidates to choose from and that’s too many. There’s no way you and I can keep an eye on that number all at once. We could take a guess, but that’s all it would be, a guess. If we get it wrong, the Adversary claims the sixth and final victim he needs.”

Cade paced back and forth in the small room, thinking it through. Riley was right; they were only going to get one shot at this. They had to get it right the first time.

The choice didn’t feel random to him; something tied these victims together, but what?

Make a list, he told himself, and start with the obvious.

They were all U.S. service personnel. They were all roughly the same age, or at least within several years of each other. They had all been in excellent physical shape right up to the event or injury that put them in the hospital.

But that was where the similarities ended.

Three were male, two were female. They had different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Different education levels. Different family backgrounds and situations. They couldn’t have gotten a more diverse group even if someone had actively worked to create one.

So why these five? Cade asked himself.

Then it hit him.

“Can you plot the hospitals were the victims were kidnapped from on a map?” he asked.

“Sure. Piece of cake.”

A moment later Riley turned the screen to face him; it showed a map of the eastern seaboard, from Boston the north to Washington DC in the south, and west to Detroit in the west.

“How about the patients on our possibles list. Can you plot their current locations in blue?”

A few seconds later fifteen blue diamonds showed up on the map.

Two of them were within the same general area as the original five. All the rest were farther west, across the Mississippi.

“Gotcha!” Cade said softly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Cade lay prone on the edge of the ridgeline, his hips pressed against the ground and his knees shoulder-width apart to improve his stability. In his hands he held an M24 US Army sniper rifle, originally chambered for a 7.62 NATO match slug but now custom refitted to handle a special long-range Templar-designed tracking device similar to those used to tag grizzly bears in the wild. This particular model was also equipped with a Leupold Mark4 10x Mildot scope, which Cade currently had dialed in on the window of a room on the eighth floor of the building downhill from him.

In that hospital room lay Sergeant First Class Edward Mason, U.S. Army, mortally injured while on patrol in Afghanistan. The sergeant had sustained severe injuries to the skull and was presently in a medically induced coma designed to give the doctors time to figure out how to deal with the growing hematoma inside his skull. According to the records Riley had been able to pull up, no one on the medical staff expected him to recover. If by some miracle he did, the long-term prognosis was that he would spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state, which, given the robust health of the rest of his body, might be for many years to come.

Mason was a perfect target for the Adversary and that was why Cade was lying on a rooftop with a scoped rifle hoping that his proximity theory was correct.

Riley was sitting behind the wheel of a van parked a few hundred yards up the road from the hospital. In the back of the van, manning the receiver for the tracking gear, was fellow Echo Team member Jimmy Martinez. When Cade made the shot, it would be Jimmy’s job to call out the directions as the tracked the demon to its lair.

Two hundred miles away, outside a hospital in Baltimore, another team led by Phil Davis was set up in similar fashion, keeping an eye Ernest Jessup in case the Adversary decided to go after him instead.

Guessing that the Adversary would take the patients closest to its current position, Cade had decided to focus on the only two patients within the same general locale. Everything ahead of them was depending on Cade’s theory being correct. If it wasn’t...

Don’t think like that, he told himself. You’ve been right so far and you’re right this time, too.

He spoke softly into the mike at his throat.

“Sound check.”

There was a pause and then Riley’s voice came over the communications headset he was wearing beneath his watch cap.

“Reading you 5 by 5, Cade.”

“Roger that. Anything on the news?”

“Nada.”

That was good, at least.

They had been at it for nearly forty-eight hours now with no sign of the Adversary. Even worse, they had no idea if or when he might show up; it was all a big guessing game. The only way they would know they were right was if the Adversary showed up at one of the two locations they were covering or if there was another report of a kidnapping victim elsewhere that fit the bill.

Cade shifted position slightly and slowly reached out for the water bottle next to him. He was well-covered in camouflage netting and didn’t expect anyone to be looking for him, but old habits die hard and he knew that quick movements drew the eye much more easily than slow ones did. He raised his head a bit to take a gulp and was just in time to see a patch of darkness slip by overhead. He wouldn’t have noticed it if the sky had been even slightly overcast; he caught sight of it only because it blotted out the stars behind it. It was too low to be an airplane and too solid to be a flock of bats, so that left only one option.

The Adversary.

He clicked his throat mike twice – the prearranged signal for spotting their target – and settled down behind his scope.

For several minutes the space outside the window remained clear, but then a large winged shadow swooped past. It was moving quickly, from left to right, but Cade didn’t try to follow it; he knew right where it would end up and that was good enough for him.

He kept his breathing even and his grip on the gun light, not wanting to tire himself out before his shot. He’d spent years as a police sniper and the old skills were so ingrained that he didn’t even think about what he was doing at this point, he just did it.

So he was perfectly calm when the Adversary returned to hover directly outside Mason’s window, some eleven stories off the ground, the muzzle of his weapon rock steady.

He settled the barrel of his weapon right on the back of the Adversary’s neck. If the gun had been capable of doing the creature any permanent harm, he might have pulled the trigger, but he knew that even a head shot wouldn’t kill the Adversary completely and so he waited for the opportunity they’d specifically come here to find. He was not here to shoot the Adversary.

You mean Gabrielle, his conscience corrected him, and he found no argument to be made otherwise. Through the scope he could see her long hair sweeping backward in the downdrafts from the wings that sprouted from where her shoulder blades normally would be. From what he could see she didn’t appear much changed from when he’d seen her on the bridge several days ago and for that he was thankful. There was still time yet, it seemed.

His heart ached for all that his wife had been through, but Cade knew that now was not the time for sentiment. He let out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding and tried to wall off his emotions, returning to the mindset he’d learned to cultivate so long ago.

Focus on the target. Focus on the job in front of you. Nothing more and nothing less.

Gabrielle – no, the Adversary, he had to think of it as the Adversary – raised its fist and smashed the full length window in front of it, the window that led into Mason’s room, and then slipped inside.

For several heart-stilling moments Cade could see nothing but the curtains from inside Mason’s room blowing in the breeze.

Come one! Come on! he urged silently.

A shadow moved behind the curtains and then the Adversary was back. It stood in the window for a moment, its latest victim hanging limp in her arms, and then it bunched the muscles in her legs and cast itself out in the night.

At that exact moment, Cade fired.

The gunsmiths who had designed the baffling system for the weapon had done an exceptional job; Cade heard nothing more than a short huff as the tracking implant left the barrel and sped toward its target. Cade’s hand was already cycling the bolt and loading another round before his conscious mind caught up with him and he managed to get off one more shot before the angle and the Adversary’s movement made it impossible to manage a third.

He just prayed two would be enough.

He waited until the shadow had passed out of sight before throwing off the camouflage net and scrambling to his feet. He slung the rifle over one shoulder and headed down the trail, trusting his feet to carry him over the uneven terrain while reaching up and keying the mike with a free hand.

“Tell me we’ve got a signal” he said between breaths.

For a moment there was nothing but silence, but then Martinez let out a whoop.

“Two, I repeat, two solid signals, moving west at thirty miles per hour. Damn this sucker can fly!”

Cade grinned; the hard part was done. As long as they stayed in range, they could track this thing to the ends of the earth.

Riley’s voice broke in over the channel. “Meet at the pickup zone in five,” he said and then the line went dead.

They weren’t on a main frequency, but silence was still the better policy. The FBI and other agencies were no doubt already involved in the search for the missing servicemen and the Templars didn’t want to take a chance of being overhead by some local yokel who could mention their conversation to the authorities.

They had what they needed; talk was superfluous at this point anyway.

Cade hustled down the hillside and reached the bottom just as Riley pulled up in the van. Cade yanked open the door, threw himself into the seat, and then pounded the dash with one hand.

“Go, go!” he yelled, but Riley needed no such urging, having already stomped on the gas and gotten them headed toward the road.

“Which way?” Cade asked, looking into the back where Martinez was manning the tracking console. Cade could see the bright red dot signifying their target clearly on the screen.

“East,” Jimmy told him. “Take Washington to the Interstate and then head east.”

The tracking device they were using had a range of over 150 miles, so they normally wouldn’t have been worried about losing their target this early in the game, but the Adversary’s ability to travel literally as the crow flies, albeit much faster, had them a bit on edge. As he watched the screen Cade could hear Riley on the telephone, already recalling the beta team from their position in Baltimore. They had a Blackhawk at their disposal, but it was going to take them a little while to get in the air and head north. Until the chopper arrived on the scene, it was up to Ortega and the others in the van to keep the Adversary in range.

As it turned out, they needn’t have worried. The Adversary climbed to a height of a couple of hundred feet – high enough to be invisible from the ground in the darkness but not so high as to worry about dealing with flight paths of the various aircraft moving overhead – and then slew northeast at a steady pace. Riley followed Interstate 287 south east out of White Plains and into Scarsdale and then picked up the Merritt Parkway where it ran northeast into Connecticut.

The Adversary could have taken its latest victim anywhere, Cade knew, and several of the available options would have made it impossible for them to follow it. South over Long Island Sound and out into the Atlantic, for instance. Or north, all the way to the border and across into Canada. But lucky for them it did no such thing.

No, the Adversary made it easy, flying straight and true on a north by northeast course that paralleled Rt. 15 into the heart of Connecticut until it reached the town of Meriden where it finally stopped.

Riley pulled over to the side of the road while Martinez tried to get a fix on where the Adversary had gone to ground. The signal was still coming in strong and it only took a few minutes to convert the GPS coordinates into a physical location.

Martinez used a handy laptop and Google Earth to get a real-time view of the location, which turned out to be a valley at the base of South Mountain near Hubbard Park, and they could see from the aerial view that a large, sprawling building shaped like a capital letter I with an extra wing jutting off to the center left stood in that precise spot.

“What is that place?” he asked, staring at it on the laptop screen.

Riley and Williams answered at the same time.

“Undercliff Sanatorium.”

Originally opened in 1910 under the name Meriden Sanatorium, the facility had expanded slowly over the years and served a variety of purposes, from a mental hospital, to a center for children with tuberculosis, to a division of the state mental health program. The last patient had been discharged from the facility in the late 1970s and it had lain fallow ever since.

Undercliff had its fair share of ghosts stories, Cade knew. Children laughing when there was no one in the room. The sound of running footsteps and the shouts of orderlies from behind closed and locked doors. The sensation of being watched when you walked down the empty corridors. Given the agony the average tuberculosis patient had endured back at the beginning of the 20th century, Cade had no doubt that the place truly was haunted.

But it still seemed an odd location for the Adversary to hide in.

“It’s the medical equipment,” Riley said under his breath, startling Cade out of his reverie.

“Huh?”

“The medical equipment. That’s why the Adversary picked this place. Finding room to store a half-dozen coma patients is one thing, but having the equipment to keep them alive in the process means he either needed access to some that was already in place or he had to knock over a medical supply company. The former was probably the easiest. With a couple of pet doctors on hand to monitor the patients, it wouldn’t have been too hard to find the gear he needed inside of an abandoned hospital, right?”

Cade had to admit that it made sense.

It also made things much easier for what he needed to do next.

“How far away are Davis and the rest of the team?”

Riley checked his watch. “It’s three hundred miles from here to Baltimore and they’ve been in the air just over an hour...I’d say we’ve got another forty minutes before they get close enough to make a difference.”

Cade nodded. “Good enough. Gives us time to scope the place out, anyway.”

“Roger that.”

It took them fifteen minutes of driving to reach South Mountain and then another ten to find a forest road leading into the woods that was wide enough to accept the van. Satisfied that they couldn’t be seen from the road – not that there was much traffic on it anyway – the three men got out and began making their way through the trees to get a look at what they were up against.

When they reached the edge of the hospital property they discovered that it was surrounded by eight-foot high chain link fencing with barbed wire strung along the top. The fencing was old, however, clearly put up decades ago to keep the curious public out when the hospital had first shut down, and it didn’t take long to find a section that had fallen into so much disrepair that a gap had formed that was large enough to admit them.

They didn’t pass through it, however, just marked it and continued their inspection of the perimeter. Twice they saw roving pairs of guards, but both times they were given plenty of advance warning thanks to the noise the guards were making between them and Cade and his two companions were able to slip into the undergrowth and wait for the patrol to pass without being seen.

By the time they had circumvented the entire property, it was clear that something out of the ordinary was going inside. They saw additional guards at both the main gate and at the front entrance to the facility – odd for a supposedly abandoned facility - as well as slivers of light seeping out past the edges of what were clearly covered windows on the third floor of the east wing.

Back at the van they double-checked that the transponder signal hadn’t moved – it hadn’t - confirming what Cade suspected all along; the Adversary intended to use Undercliff as a staging area for the ritual to come. The hospital had the equipment necessary to maintain the patients he had kidnapped as vessels for the other fallen angels in his scream and he’d clearly brought in some of his human acolytes to handle guard duty and other chores leading up to that point.

While Riley checked in with Davis, Cade stood by the side of the van, staring off in the direction of the sanatorium. His hand dropped unconsciously to the hilt of the dagger at his waist, running his fingers over the rough steel, as he thought about the confrontation to come.

Uriel had said that the power of the Tear would activate when it came in contact with the Adversary’s blood. He had, no doubt, believed that Cade would be striking with deadly force in order to draw that blood; the Adversary certainly wasn’t going to just stand around and let that happen. It was a logical assumption to make. Gabrielle’s body would be the recipient of that blow, hence Uriel’s remark that it would be deadly to her as well.

But Cade wasn’t convinced it had to happen that way. In fact, he was all but positive that it didn’t. He was going to use the Tear, just as Uriel instructed, but he would make sure the blow wasn’t the least bit dangerous to Gabrielle.

He would rescue his wife, just as he had intended all along.

They would beat this thing, once and for all.

Hang in there Gabrielle, he thought. Just a little while longer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Davis and the three men with him arrived ten minutes later and the entire seven man team suited up for what was to come. All of them pulled on standard Templar tactical gear that included dark ceramic body armor worn under black jumpsuits of flame retardant material without markings or insignia, lightweight Kevlar tactical helmets with built–in communications gear along with audio and video recording devices, and military style combat boots. For this mission a set of I2 goggles had also been supplied; the image intensifier headgear – what most people called night vision goggles – would allow them to see in all but total darkness. Each man was armed with a Heckler & Koch MP5 SD submachine gun, a HK Mark 23 .45 caliber handgun and the holy sword they’d been given at their investiture into the Templar ranks. Cade eschewed the MP5, as was his habit, taking extra magazines for the Mark 23 instead and slipping them into the loops on his belt next to the angel’s blade.

Last, but certainly not least, he picked up a long case roughly the width of a standard sword case but twice as long. He’d used the mirror in Riley’s quarters to slip into the Reliquary to get it, figuring what it contained would come in handy when they finally faced the Adversary. Now he stared at it, wondering if it was a smart move or not.

“You really gonna use that thing?” Riley asked, from over his shoulder.

Cade glanced in his direction and in that moment made up his mind.

“We don’t really have a choice, do we?” he asked. “The Adversary is ten times stronger than we are and that’s on an off day. We’ll have surprise on our side, sure, but if we’re going to beat this thing we need a little more firepower, too. This will give us that.”

“I’m all for more firepower, but you don’t know how to use that thing any better than I do,” Riley said. “One wrong move and it could blow up in your face.”

“Then you probably better stay behind me,” Cade said with a grin.

Riley was right; he didn’t know how to use the relic. But if Simon Logan could do it, so could he. He pointedly ignored the little voice in the back of his head that kept telling him that the Necromancer had years of experience in dealing with sorcerous artifacts.

Satisfied that he had what he needed, he stepped to the side and watched the men finish gearing up. He liked what he saw; they were focused and ready.

“How much have you told them?” he asked Riley.

“Just that we’re here to rescue the missing soldiers and that we think that the Adversary is behind it all. They’ve been instructed to focus on any human followers who might be present and leave the Adversary to you and me, no matter what.”

Cade nodded; the men were Echo veterans and that would be explanation enough for them. The fact that they were here at all spoke volumes about their faith in him. He intended to live up to that faith.

When the last man finished, Cade gathered them into a group just as they always did before a mission. Just another day on the job, he told himself.

“All right, listen up. Our objective is a ward on the third floor of the east wing. It’s there that the Adversary is preparing a ritual intended to drag six of his former allies back out of hell and stuff them into the bodies of the soldiers that he’s kidnapped. I don’t think any of you need me to tell you what bad news it would be for all of us if he succeeds in doing that.”

A couple of them nodded their heads. Cade had no doubt that they understood what they were up against and the stakes ahead of them if they failed.

“I know you’ve heard some rumors about me lately,” Cade told them. “Normally I wouldn’t dignify them by even mentioning it, but I want you all to be clear about what’s going on.”

He pointed through the woods behind him in the direction of the abandoned hospital.

“Inside that building back there is the motherfucker that murdered my wife. I think you all know that.”

Nods all around this time.

“I intend to make him pay for that; to make him pay for every missed moment, every stolen memory, every potential dream that I could have shared with her had he never crossed our paths.

“We know the Adversary’s in there, but the rest of our intelligence is pretty weak. We can expect him to have anywhere from a handful to a couple-dozen human followers working on his behalf, if past experience holds up, but that’s about all we can tell you. If they aren’t in a coma, they’re fair game. Your job is to secure the service personnel. Riley and I will handle the Adversary.”

Cade glanced around to be sure everyone was on the same page and then went on.

“Davis, Mills, and D’Angelo, you’ve got the front entrance. Distract and stall the guards there as long as you can. I’ll take Riley, Martinez, and O’Connor into the building from the rear and we’ll meet on the third floor, hopefully catching them between us. Questions?”

There weren’t any so Cade turned the group over to Riley, who led them in a quick prayer for safety and a successful outcome as was their custom, and then they split up.

Cade took his trio through the woods to the break in the fence. There they hunkered down and waited for Davis’ team to do their job.

It didn’t take long. Angry shouts soon floated through the night air and Cade watched as the roving duo of guards hustled past their position, headed for the front gate. He smiled as he watched them hustle past; he’d been betting their duty discipline would be poor and he’d been right.

Stop gloating and get on with it.

They slipped through the fence and hurried across the lawn to the rear of the main building. Cade and Martinez stood watch while O’Connor and Riley stepped up to one of the boarded-up doorways, crowbars in hand. The plywood nailed over the door was quickly pried off and the foursome entered the building, pulling on their night vision gear as they went.

Cade moved quickly through the lower floor of the main building, heading for the adjacent wing where they suspected the Adversary had set up shop. Behind him, the men followed in standard formation, with Riley and Martinez behind Cade and O’Connor bringing up the rear.

As they passed from one section of the building to another, Cade could hear the sound of a generator rumbling somewhere above them. He held up a closed fist in the signal to stop and sank to one knee, the men behind him doing the same. He listened, trying to get a fix on the sound, and then waved Riley forward.

Cade pointed upward. “Second or third floor?”

Riley listened another moment and then said, “Second. Sounds too clear to be third.”

“Agreed.”

At the first stairwell that they came to, Cade headed upward.

# # #

The generator was set up in the middle of a second floor ward, just as they’d suspected. From where Cade crouched in a doorway down the hall, he could see that it was a large, industrial-grade model, the kind normally used outside for parades, concerts, and other large-scale events. Large black electrical conduits snaked away from it across the room, but Cade’s view was limited and he couldn’t see where they led.

Two men armed with AR-15s stood watch over the generator, but it was clear from their body language and positioning that they didn’t expect company. Cade watched them for a couple of minutes and the fact that neither man interacted with anyone else in the room, not even a glance, confirmed his suspicion that they were alone. He drew his pistol and then glanced across the hall to where Riley was crouched in a similar doorway. Riley had his weapon in hand as well. Like Cade’s, it had a sound suppressor screwed onto the end of the barrel.

A glance passed between them.

As one they lined up their shots on the unsuspecting men ahead of them and then fired, Riley a split second after Cade.

Both shots were true; the guards collapsed to the floor, the sound of their fall covered by the noise of the generator behind them. Cade waited a few seconds for a response, but when none was forthcoming he gave the signal for the squad to move up.

As Cade had guessed, the two now-dead guards had been the only people in the room.

Riley and Martinez quickly searched the bodies while Cade wandered over to examine the generator. It was a standard model, the kind you could rent at any good supply house for a weekend of work outdoors. It was chugging merrily along and the guards had been prepared to keep it doing so for some time, if the gasoline cans stacked in the corner behind it were any indication.

Cade stared at the generator a moment, thinking about his next move. The device had obviously been brought in to provide power for the lights, monitors, and life support systems the doctors were using in order to keep the patients alive until the Adversary conducted its ritual. A flip of the switch and he could cut the power, which, if it remained off long enough, would effectively put an end to the Adversary’s plans.

But only temporarily, he thought. I’d stop the ritual, but I’d also end up with six dead innocent soldiers and be forced to track the Adversary down all over again.

Better to leave things as they were, he decided. The two dead guards were two less enemies at their backs and that was good enough.

Four large black conduits, each about the size of a fire hose, ran from the back of the generator, across the room and out the door. Figuring they would lead him to right to the missing soldiers, Cade decided to follow them.

The conduits ran down the hall about a hundred feet and then turned left, running up a staircase to the next floor. Cade led the men in the same direction, pausing at the bottom of the stairs to be certain they were unguarded before continuing upward. At the top, the conduits ran down another darkened corridor and through a set of double doors at the far end.

Light was spilling from between them.

Cade stared at that light, an uneasy feeling curling through his gut. Something wasn’t right.

Why wasn’t someone watching this approach? Where were the guards?

He had expected more resistance than what they had encountered so far. Much more. And yet there had been next to nothing.

Could they have surprised the Adversary so completely that the metaphorical back door had been left unguarded and open?

It seemed highly unlikely, which is why Cade was feeling so uneasy. Still, he didn’t have much choice but to continue onward. They’d come here to confront the Adversary and they weren’t going to do that while skulking about in the dark.

Cade set the case he was carrying down on the floor beside him. He unlatched it, opened it up, and pulled back the layer of silk that lay over the relic stored inside, exposing it to view.

The blade of the Roman-style lance was made of iron and was several inches in length, with a winged shape and an ornamental pin inserted down its center. Two additional wings had been added near the base of the blade and were tied to it with leather straps. The wooden shaft had been cut down to a more manageable length since he’d last seen it, giving him a weapon some six feet in length.

He could feel the power coming off of it like a low-grade hum that filled the room.

Several years ago Cade and the rest of the Echo Team had worked hard to recover this very artifact – known to many as the Spear of Destiny or the Spear of Longinus - from the hands of the Necromancer, Simon Logan, who, with the help of a traitor inside the Order, had stolen it from the storage facility where it had been housed. Legend claimed that it was the spear the Roman centurion, Longinus, had used to stab the body of Christ while he hung on the cross. Cade had no idea if the legend was true or not, but there was no doubt of the relic’s power. He had seen that power utilized by the Necromancer and he hoped that it would respond to his need as well in the coming battle with the Adversary.

If it didn’t...well, he didn’t want to think about that right now.

He lifted it out of its case and pushed the against the wall, out of the way.

He signaled the others that they were moving out and then led them down the corridor to the double doors at the far end.

A sign beside the doors identified the room beyond as Convalescent Ward B32.

Without any other options available to him, Cade pushed open the double doors and stepped inside.

The first thing that he noticed was that the former convalescent ward was large enough to have held somewhere between thirty and forty patients at a time, most likely in evenly spaced rows about five feet apart. Some of the steel bed frames that had once held the former patients were still there, pushed into a ramshackle pile in the corner to his immediate left. He assumed the curtained bays on the other side of the room held more.

The second thing was that he was not alone.

Seven modern hospital beds were arranged in a semi-circle in front of him about two thirds of the way across the room. Six of the beds were occupied; four by men, two by women.

No doubt the missing servicemen, Cade thought.

But then a slim, auburn-haired woman dressed in the dirty remains of a jersey and a pair of blue jeans stepped out from behind one of the patient’s monitors and Cade had eyes only for her.

“Hello Cade,” she said, with a smile.

It looked like Gabrielle. Talked like Gabrielle. Even smiled like Gabrielle. But Cade knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was talking to the Adversary.

It seemed that they’d been expected.

If there was any doubt over that fact, it was banished with the Adversary’s next words.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Cade felt the door open behind him and heard his teammates enter the room, but he didn’t dare look back. He kept his attention firmly on the figure standing in front of him, knowing that a strike might come at any moment.

Besides, he didn’t need to look; he knew the trio would be fanning out behind him so that they could cover the entire room in overlapping fields of firepower. Not that it would do much good against the Adversary, as previous experience had shown, but it was better than nothing.

Trying to buy some time to figure out how he was going to get the Adversary away from the patients so that he would have room to strike, Cade spoke the traditional Templar words of challenge offering the creature before him the chance to surrender.

“In the name of the Lord Almighty, I call upon you to relinquish your weapons and receive the mercy of Christ the King.”

The Adversary smiled, spreading its hands and playing along. “Alas, I have no weapons to surrender. Instead, I have an agreement to offer you.”

“What agreement?”

“Join me,” the Adversary said simply, indicating the still empty bed.

For a moment Cade could only stand there, incredulous that the Adversary still believed there was something it could offer that would turn him from enemy to ally.

Mistaking his hesitation for serious consideration of its offer, the Adversary went on.

“Rule with me, Cade. Rule with me! Together we can be regents of the new world order that will rise from the ashes of the decimation to come. Side by side, husband and wife, just as we were always meant to be!”

It sounded just like Gabrielle. Of course the Gabrielle that he knew would never want to rule over anyone, least of all those left to scrape out a living in the blasted ruins of an earth that Cade had seen in his vision on Poveglia, but the Adversary didn’t seem to understand that.

And that lack of understanding gave Cade the opening he needed.

“You’re not my wife,” Cade said, but he let a bit of doubt creep into his voice as he did so.

The Adversary took the bait.

“I am your wife and more!” it exclaimed. “Every thought, every feeling, every moment of her life is right here, ready to be accessed as needed. Combined with that is more power than you could ever imagine, power to turn this body into anything you’ve ever dreamed it could be. Think of what we could do, Cade! Join me now, before it is too late!”

Cade could feel the tension coming from the men at his back and he knew at least one of them had to be wondering if Cade would take the Adversary up on its offer, especially given the recent rumors. What he had to do next was going to increase that concern, but it couldn’t be helped. He needed to get closer if he was going to use the soul blade as intended.

He took a few hesitant steps forward, letting the tip of the Spear sink downward a little as he did so. Just a few more inches...

“Join me, husband,” the Adversary said in Gabrielle’s most seductive voice and Cade felt his stomach churn at the sound. To hear it speak that way to him, knowing that Gabrielle herself had nothing to do with it, was an abomination and he intended to put an end to it.

Now or never, he thought.

Cade stopped; he was less than a dozen feet away from the Adversary now and within what he hoped was proper striking range. He was only going to get one chance at this...

“Join you?” he said. “I think not.”

And with those words he thrust the Spear forward, mentally calling forth the power he knew lay within the weapon and demanding that respond to his call.

For a second nothing happened but then the Spear burst to life in his hands, a brilliant blaze of green light igniting around the lance head in a swirling ball of power and then lashing forward straight for the Adversary.

The fallen angel responded instantly, throwing itself to the side so that the beam narrowly missed it by inches, striking the empty hospital bed behind it instead. The force of the blast flung the hospital bed out of the semi-circle and halfway across the room to slam against the far wall.

At that point, several things happened simultaneously, but Cade was so pumped up on adrenaline that they seemed to like the stop frames in a slow motion film.

The curtains at the back of the room were flung back and half a dozen armed guards came running out on either side, firing the AR-15s they held in their hands at the waiting Templars.

The Templars responded in kind and Cade suddenly found himself in the center of a whirling dervish of bullets whipping back and forth between the two groups like the shoot-out at the OK Corral.

That’s when the Adversary entered the fray.

It brought its hands up to shoulder height and then flung its arms forward as if it were a circus performer throwing a pair of knives. Blasts of blue arcane power shot from her hands in Cade’s direction.

Cade didn’t have time to think, just to react and so that’s precisely what he did, bringing the Spear up in a sweeping arc in front of him, moving it from left to right as fast as he could.

A glimmering sphere of energy appeared in front of him, deflecting the Adversary’s strikes upward into the ceiling and sending dust and ceiling tiles tumbling downward in their wake. No sooner had he managed to deflect the first two that more were on their way and Cade soon found himself in a battle just to keep from getting struck without any time to deliver a blow of his own.

Riley and the rest weren’t fairing much better. The Templars training gave them the advantage in the firefight and three of the Adversary’s human followers lay dead on the floor within the first few seconds, with two other wounded and out of the fight, but it wasn’t long before a stray shot caught O’Connor in the throat, leaving the odds two to seven in the enemy’s favor.

Riley and Martinez headed for the nearby pile of debris, miraculously avoiding being hit in the process, and hunkered down behind it for protection while continuing to fire at their assailants on that side of the room.

Cade meanwhile ran the other way, trying to put the patient’s beds between him and the Adversary while rushing the last two gunmen on the opposite side. He had no idea what he was going to do when he got there; all he knew was that he couldn’t stand still. If he did, he’d be cut to ribbons in the crossfire.

The Adverary turned to follow his movements and stepped onto the remains of an IV bag that had come loose in the initial exchange of fire. Its foot slid out from under it, momentarily distracting it, and Cade lashed out with a strike of his own, hitting it square in the chest with a blast of energy that picked the Adversary up and flung it backward across the room.

The move wasn’t without consequence, however, for it left him exposed to gunfire coming from the gunmen on his right and he felt a searing pain cross his thigh as a bullet tore a furrow on the outside of his right leg.

Cade stumbled, then regained his footing. The near-fall saved his life, as he felt the bullet that had been aimed at his head pass harmlessly over his shoulder, and he reacted with a fear-induced burst of energy, dropping to his knees in a slide across the floor while aiming a blast from the Spear in the gunman’s direction.

Blood, bone, and vaporizing flesh blew in every direction as the arcane strike tore the gunmen to literal pieces.

Cade scrambled to his feet and was just in time to see the Adversary doing the same. He was both disappointed and relieved; he wanted the Adversary to be out of the fight but didn’t want to permanently damage Gabrielle’s body in the process. Apparently fallen angels were made of sterner stuff than the average human, even while possessing a body not its own.

The Adversary raised it arms again, but this time Cade was faster off the mark and the blast of green energy that burst from the tip of the Spear struck his opponent in the leg, throwing it to the floor once more.

Cade screamed a wordless shout of victory and charged forward, rushing toward the Adversary while brandishing the Spear. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had some vague idea of getting the creature to surrender under threat of the power of the relic, but the Adversary was faster than he expected. Before he had even crossed half the distance, it had scrambled to its feet, crossed the remaining space at the back of the room and disappeared through a door Cade hadn’t previously noticed.

Oh, no you don’t, you son of a bitch, Cade thought and went after it.

He burst through the door and flung himself to the ground, allowing the strike from the Adversary to pass harmlessly over his head. He sent a blast of his own shooting down the corridor in return, but the Adversary was already hauling itself up the staircase at the far end and the strike did nothing more blow a hole in the wall nearby.

Climbing to his feet, Cade ran in pursuit.

He could see the Adversary was struggling; its movements weren’t as fluid and its attacks, when it looked back to send a blast of power in his direction, were less accurate than before. He didn’t know if that was because he had injured it somehow or if Gabrielle had joined the party, fighting back against the enemy from within. Cade hoped it was the latter, but either way it allowed him to close the distance much quicker than he expected.

He was only a quarter of a flight down when the Adversary burst through the doors at the top of the steps and Cade caught a brief flash of starscape as it slipped through.

That’s when it hit him.

The doors led to the roof and the Adversary intended to abandon the fight to try again another day.

Cade couldn’t let that happen!

He threw every ounce of energy he had left into climbing those steps and burst through the doors just steps behind his quarry. As the Adversary’s wings burst from its back and began to beat in rhythm, Cade raised the Spear for another strike.

Except this time, it failed to respond.

Frantic, knowing that if he let it go he might spend years tracking it down again, Cade did the only thing he could think of.

He called out the words of an ancient Sumerian binding spell he’d long ago committed to memory, completely unaware that it was the same spell his wife gave to Riley to control the angel Baraquel during their accidental trip into the Beyond while exploring the Eden facility years before.

The Adversary bunched its legs, preparing to launch itself into the night air...and then froze in place as the words of the binding washed over it.

Cade breathed a sigh of relief, hefted the seemingly useless Spear, and advanced on his quarry.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Up close, Cade could see the changes the Adversary had wrought in his wife’s form. Her face was narrower, with sunken cheeks and deep-set eyes, a face that was far harsher and more severe than her normal one. Her brilliant green eyes were now flecked with black splotches and Cade could see that it wouldn’t be long before all of the color was overtaken and replaced.

Her skin had taken on a leathery tone as well and he could see the veins beneath pulsing with a fluid far darker than human blood. He had no doubt that her flesh would eventually resemble the reptilian-like hide that currently covered the oversized wings that sprouted from her back.

She was frozen in the act of launching herself into the sky above, those wings caught in mid-stroke, but her eyes followed him as he drew closer and the hatred that spilled from them was as alien to Gabrielle as the wings at her back.

This was not his wife; he knew that now beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But he hoped and prayed that she was still in there somewhere.

Time to find out.

He pulled the dagger from his belt and watched the Adversary’s eyes widen at the sight of it.

Cade could feel all the anger and hatred that he’d been holding back for years coming to the fore and the Adversary’s obvious fear at the sight of the ancient weapon acted like gasoline thrown on a bonfire.

“Years ago I swore I’d have my vengeance, that there would one day be a reckoning. That day has arrived. You escaped me once, but you won’t do so again.”

He reached up and carefully placed the edge of the blade against the exposed flesh of the Adversary’s upper arm.

“Back to hell where you belong, asshole!” Cade said and then drew the dagger slowly across the skin, going just deep enough to draw a thin line of blood that spilled across the surface of the blade.

He didn’t know what he expected; some mystical lightshow straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with lost souls flying hither and tither about the room as the Adversary was slowly pulled free of Gabrielle’s form and banished to the nether realms, at the very least.

What he didn’t expect was what he got, which was nothing.

Or next to nothing, actually. The blade soaked up the blood that spilled across it as if it was a man dying of thirst in the Gobi desert, but that was all.

No spectacular explosions of mystical power.

No scream of defiance as the Adversary was pulled from Gabrielle’s body.

Uriel’s words whispered unbidden in his mind.

You must either slash the Adversary’s throat or plunge the knife into its heart.

No.

He couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t do that.

This had to work.

But after another minute, when nothing else happened, Cade was faced with the realization that it would not.

Involuntarily, Cade glanced up into the Adversary’s eyes and found the creature laughing at him.

The Adversary knew.

Knew he could no more take that knife and plunge it in his wife’s heart than he could shove it into his own.

Knew that the binding would not hold it for much longer. Knew that when the binding failed, the Adversary would be free to escape to continue its plan once more.

Knew that Cade had failed.

It was too much for Cade to handle. He could feel his mental defenses starting to crumble, the barriers that he had erected to keep himself sane and functioning in the face of all that he had done and witnessed in the days since first encountering the fallen angel collapsing inward as if under assault from a relentless foe, and in a last-ditch effort born of despair and frustration Cade did something he hadn’t done in years.

Cade turned his face upward into the night sky and cried out in agony.

“What have we done to deserve this? Why have you abandoned us? Abandoned me?”

There was, of course, no answer.

Cade hadn’t actually expected one; he just couldn’t think of anything else to do.

He dropped to his knees before the still frozen form of the fallen angel before him and waited for the binding to wear off and the end to come. If he could not save Gabrielle then he would not save himself either.

It would end here, for better or worse.

The sound started softly at first, a gentle hum at the edge of his hearing, but it built swiftly, growing louder and rising in pitch, forcing him to cover his ears in pain and still it continued.

Cade had heard the sound twice before, knew what was about to make its appearance, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Nothing mattered in the face of his failure to rescue Gabrielle.

The sound built and built and built again, growing louder and more piercing until when he thought he couldn’t possibly endure it any more...silence fell.

Cade looked up to find the seven standing before him, just as they had on previous occasions, shiny with the glory of the Almighty that, if asked, Cade would have told you he was hard-pressed to believe in.

The leader stepped forward and for the first time there was a sense of urgency in his voice.

“Son of Adam, you must finish what you have started.”

Cade shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said wearily.

He stared down at the knife in his hands and felt despair fill his heart.

“You must!”

Cade offered the weapon to the angel without looking up. “Take it. Do it. I cannot.”

“No one else can wield the weapon. You must do as Uriel commanded if you wish to put an end to this.”

“I can’t, damn you!” he screamed.

“You do not understand the horror to...”

Cade surged to his feet and rushed forward, brandishing Gabriel’s Tear as if he intended to use it on the angel standing before him.

“No, you don’t understand!” He pointed the blade at the thing hanging there beside them, the thing that wore his wife’s body like a child wore a Halloween costume, and shouted his defiance in the angel’s face.

“Somewhere in there my wife still holds on, still fights to free herself from that bastard’s grip. Killing the Adversary means killing her as well and I will not do that to the one I love more than life itself! I am not God and I will not make that choice!”

He turned, about to hurl the Tear over the edge of the roof, when a voice brought him up short.

“Cade?”

He spun around to face the Adversary...and found himself addressing Gabrielle.

Her face had changed – her features were less severe, her eyes had returned to their natural color – and she was smiling at him in a way he had longed to see her smile for so very, very long.

But her next words were a horror unto themselves.

“You must do this, Cade.”

He shook his head as he stared at her with tear-filled eyes. Did she not understand the horror of what she was asking him to do? He would rather take his own life...

The binding must have been starting to wear off, for she gestured with one hand for him to come closer.

Cade did so.

“Take my hand, husband.”

With the Tear still held in his right hand, Cade reached out to her with his left.

The minute their hands met the visions swept over them like a tsunami, drowning them beneath their weight, image after image of the two of them ruling over a blasted wasteland with bloody hunger and an iron fist. People were nothing more than pawns in their grasp, to be used any way they saw fit, and Cade saw scene after scene of scattered groups of survivors being crushed under the heels of their demonic troops, of men, women, and children being tortured in as many different ways as there were faces of prisoners, of horror after horror being enacted on a global scale.

Cade cried out against the onslaught, appalled by what he was seeing, and then the visions were gone and he was left looking into the face of his lost love.

“If you do not strike, if you let your love for me stay your hand, he will use that very love against you,” Gabrielle said to him softly. “He will corrupt your heart and turn you into the very thing he has desired all along, a champion of darkness to rival all those who have come before. Out of your devotion to me you will remain by his side, trapped forever by his promise to one day set me free, and to reach that end you will do anything he asks. You will commit every kind of atrocity possible and still that will not be enough to sate his hunger; he was always require more.

“And so we will rule together over this blasted land, Queen and servant forever bound together by the one thing that should never have become corrupted in the first place.

“Our love for one another.”

Gabrielle reached out and caught hold of his other hand at the wrist, the blade of the Tear caught in the circle between them. Both of them were weeping openly now and the angels stood in a circle around them, bearing silent witness to the pain and sorrow that threatened to drown them forever, as if by viewing their pain they could somehow wash it away and make them whole once more.

But Cade knew the truth now.

He would never be whole ever again.

“You must do this, Cade,” Gabrielle told him softly.

He knew she was right; if he was honest, he had known deep in his heart that this was necessary ever since Uriel had first raised the issue, perhaps even as far back as the night of the Necromancer’s botched ritual.

“I know,” he answered, tears obscuring his vision. “But I’m not sure that I can...”

Through his tears he watched her bring his hands together so that they both rested on the hilt of the weapon, the blade pointed upward.

A shudder went through her and her grip tightening involuntarily, so tight that he felt some of the small bones in his hands snap beneath her grip and he clenched his teeth against the pain.

“Hurry, Cade,” she said, as another shudder wracked her frame. “We’re running out of time. He’s fighting against the binding and I can’t hold him back for much longer. Hurry!”

He nodded, but made no move to do anything more.

How does one hurry to murder his own wife?

Gabrielle’s whole body suddenly spasmed involuntarily and it was clear the binding was about to fail. She caught his gaze and said simply, “Please, my love.”

With a soul-crushing cry of anguish Cade drove the dagger upward, under her rib cage and directly into her heart in a single, swift but deadly blow.

He felt her body stiffen.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered as a sob escaped him.

In that moment the magick of the Tear finally activated. There was a flash of power so strong that Cade was picked up off his feet and thrown backward by the force of it, passing between two of the angels standing in the circle behind him and slamming to the rooftop several yards away. Ignoring the pain, he forced himself to roll over and look back the way he had come, determined not to miss Gabrielle’s final moments.

When he looked up he saw Gabrielle’s hands wrapped around the hilt of the dagger buried deep in her chest and her body floating several inches off the roof, as if suspended there by an invisible rope. Her eyes met his one last time and then brilliant shafts of light burst from the middle of her body, one for each angel in the circle surrounding her, lashing out across the distance between them. As one, the angels opened their mouths and swallowed that power whole as it got close, drawing it down deep inside themselves like sucking water from a garden hose. Cade could hear the spit and crackle of the energy passing between them, could see the light growing brighter and brighter as more and more of that power was pulled from the depths of the Adversary’s being, and then there was a sudden, blinding flash accompanied by a clap of thunder that shook the building down to its foundations and made Cade turn his head away from the tableau before him.

When he looked back again, seconds later, the angels stood swaying unsteadily on their feet but Gabrielle was gone.

In the place where she had stood, only a darkened pile of ash remained.

The leader of the scream looked up into the night sky as if addressing someone only he could see and said, “It is over. Asharael is no more.”

Cade collapsed to the rooftop next to that pile of ash, his body wracked by sobs.

The angel was right; it was over. He had won the battle, but lost the war. Rather than save his wife he had become the instrument of her demise.

Riley found him there moments later, the Spear a few feet away.

Of the angels, there was no sign.

EPILOGUE

Two thousand miles away, in a room in a charity hospital in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a female patient who had been locked in a coma for more than two years suddenly bolted upright in her bed.

There was a nurse in the room at the time, recording the patient’s vitals on her chart, and the sudden movement so startled her that she fled from the room in fear, screaming about the dead coming back to life. It took several minutes for her colleagues to calm her down enough to understand what had happened.

When they finally got around to sending someone into the room to check on the patient, they found her standing by the window staring out into the night. Given the impossibility of that event, they immediately sent for her doctor, a man named Vargas, who arrived ten minutes later.

Dr. Vargas stopped in the doorway, eyeing her from where he stood, unwilling to get any closer.

The patient turned and addressed him in a voice as clear as a bell.

“I need to speak to my husband. It’s urgent.”

Vargas frowned. The patient’s name was Rodriguez. Anna Rodriguez, he knew. She was here in this hospital rather than the better one downtown because she was a ward of the state; she had no family and therefore no one to care for her. She was the victim of a motorcycle accident that had left her with a crushed skull and significant damage to the frontal lobe of her brain; she hadn’t been wearing a helmet when she’d been thrown from the seat of her bike and the resulting impact with the pavement had done the rest. No one had expected her to ever regain consciousness, least of all Vargas. It was only charity from a wealthy donor that had kept life support hooked up and running all this time; if Vargas had been in charge he would have disconnected the machines a long time ago.

But, thankfully it seemed, Vargas wasn’t in charge and the patient, rather than succumbing to an injury that should have killed her, had made a miraculous recovery.

Waking up would have been miracle enough, but Rodriguez apparently didn’t do things by half-measure. Not only had she woken up, but she had pulled out her feeding tube, gotten out of bed and crossed the room on her own, and was now talking to him as if nothing had ever happened to her.

It was enough to make the hair on the back of Vargas’ neck stand at attention.

But that was nothing compared to how he felt when she turned around and stepped toward him, allowing the light from the bedside lamp to fall across her features.

It wasn’t that she was beautiful; in fact, far from it.

What shocked Vargas to his core was the realization that Anna Rodriguez had awoken from her long sleep whole and unmarked.

The extensive scars along her skull that had been left in the wake of her emergency surgery were gone. So, too, were the steel rod and pins that had been implanted to allow the bone to go back in the proper location. Even the skin grafts that had been used to reconstruct the entire left side of her face – torn to ribbons when she’d slid along the uneven pavement for several dozen yards – had healed without a trace.

Even her eyes, which he remembered as a soft shade of brown, had undergone a transformation to green.

His patient caught his astonished gaze with a steady one of her own and repeated her demand.

“I need to speak to my husband. It’s a matter of life and death. He doesn’t understand what he’s done!”

Trembling, Vargas somehow found his voice.

“And your husband’s name?” he asked.

Rodriguez paused, as if searching her memory. After a long pause she turned to the doctor, a slight smile on her features.

“Cade. My husband’s name is Cade Williams.”

The story continues in FALL OF NIGHT

BEFORE LEAVING THE COMMANDERY

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Interested in more TEMPLAR books?

The Templar Chronicles Series

The Heretic (Book One)

A Scream of Angels (Book Two)

A Tear in the Sky (Book Three)

Infernal Games (Book Four)

Judgment Day (Book Five)

Fall of Night (Book Six)

Books one, two, and three are also available in a discount-priced bundle.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph Nassise is the author of more than twenty novels, including the internationally bestselling TEMPLAR CHRONICLES series, the JEREMIAH HUNT trilogy, and the GREAT UNDEAD WAR series. He has also written several books in the popular Rogue Angel action-adventure series. He is a multiple Bram Stoker Award and International Horror Guild Award nominee and his work has been translated into half a dozen languages to date. He has written for both the comic and role-playing game industries and also served two terms as president of the Horror Writers Association, the world's largest organization of professional horror and dark fantasy writers.

JUDGMENT DAY

Copyright 2014 by Joseph Nassise

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Table of Contents

- JUDGMENT DAY
- WELCOME TO THE ORDER
- PROLOGUE
- CHAPTER ONE
- CHAPTER TWO
- CHAPTER THREE
- CHAPTER FOUR
- CHAPTER FIVE
- CHAPTER SIX
- CHAPTER SEVEN
- CHAPTER EIGHT
- CHAPTER NINE
- CHAPTER TEN
- CHAPTER ELEVEN
- CHAPTER TWELVE
- CHAPTER THIRTEEN
- CHAPTER FOURTEEN
- CHAPTER FIFTEEN
- CHAPTER SIXTEEN
- CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
- CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
- CHAPTER NINETEEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY
- CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
- CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
- CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
- CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
- CHAPTER THIRTY
- CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
- EPILOGUE
- BEFORE LEAVING THE COMMANDERY
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR