Infernal Games (Templar Chronicles Urban Fantasy Series) (15 page)

Cade
took a deep breath, drew his gun, and pushed open the door.

––––––––

A
fter
the debacle that was their raid on the safe-house in Norwalk, the Echo command
unit returned to the Ravensgate commandery and debriefed. Riley passed on word
about the theft to the facilities commander and was told the safe house would
be cleaned, restocked, and the alarm systems given an upgrade. He spent some
time cleaning and storing his gear and was on his way to his office to write up
his after-action report when a messenger intercepted him in the hallway,
informing him that he was wanted in the Preceptor’s office forthwith.

Reversing
direction, Riley went to answer the summons.

When
he arrived, he found the Preceptor storming about his office, shouting at his
personal assistant and waving his hands in the air. His face was red with
anger. The minute he entered the room, the Preceptor speared him with angry
eyes.

“What
the hell are you doing out there, Captain?!”

Riley
wondered if their raid that afternoon had been caught on videotape or
something. He couldn’t think of anything else that would set the Preceptor off
in this fashion...

“I
told you to track down Commander Williams and bring him in for questioning! Why
the hell hasn’t that happened yet?!”

Riley
stood at attention. “We’ve been having difficulty locating Commander
Williams.”

The
Preceptor stopped moving about and focused all of his attention on Riley.

“You
don’t know where he is?”

“No,
sir, I don’t.”

“Really?
Not even a little clue?”

“No,
sir.”

What
the hell?
If one of his guys had leaked something to the Preceptor than he
had just damned himself with that last denial, but there was no way he was
giving up his friend until he understood what was going on.

“Well
then I’ll tell you where that sonofabitch is, Captain! He’s right here, in
your own backyard! While you are out gallivanting around chasing ghosts he’d
breaking into the reliquary and stealing another precious artifact!”

The
Preceptor stalked over to his desk and snatched up the remote. He pointed it
at the flat screen on the wall across from his desk and stabbed at the power
button. The screen flared to life, showing what looked to Riley to be a
surveillance video of some kind. The image was black and white and had that
strange, stretched look that you get from shooting through a wide angle lens
like those they use to cover as much distance and angle as possible.

This
particular video was aimed at a particular door at the end of a long corridor.
Because he’d been there before, to witness the death of this man’s predecessor
no less, Riley recognized it as the corridor outside the reliquary at the
commandery in Rhode Island.

The
reliquary...

Oh,
shit.

A
man entered the video frame from the section of the hallway not covered by the
camera. He was dressed in dark clothing – black, maybe dark blue, it was hard
to tell given that it was black and white video – and he carried a pistol in
his right hand. He walked directly to the end of the hall and stopped in front
of the security devices controlling entrance to the reliquary, in this case a
palm scanner and a card reader. He stashed the gun in the small of his back
for a moment, dug a key card out of his pocket, and swiped it through the
reader. The light on the reader changed, no doubt from red to green,
indicating the card had been accepted. The intruder then pressed one hand
against the scanner while he did something to the number pad with his other one.

To
Riley’s surprise, the door clicked open.

Still,
Riley didn’t see how any of this involved Cade. The intruder in the video
might be him, it might not. It was awful hard to tell when all you could see
what the back of the man’s head!

The
man in the video could be anyone. He could name half-a-dozen people who fit
the general description without trying. For all Riley knew it could be one of
the Necromancer’s cronies. Hell it could be the Necromancer himself! After
all, Logan and Williams were of the same general height and build. The
Necromancer had managed to infiltrate their defenses once before and it seemed
likely that he could have figured out a way to do so again.

Riley
was about to say as much to Johannson when the man in the video did a strange
thing. As he reached out to push open the door to the reliquary, the intruder
turned and looked back in the direction of the camera.

The
angle wasn’t perfect and the image was degraded a little bit by the lighting in
the hallway, but that didn’t matter too much.

There
was no mistaking that the man in the video was Cade.

“There!”
Johannson said, freezing the image so that Cade’s face filled the screen. “Right
there! Do you see that cocky son-of-a-bitch?! He’s doing it on purpose.
Daring us to try and stop him!”

“I’m
not sure that’s...”

Riley
didn’t get any further. The Preceptor rounded on him like a bloodhound that
had caught a scent.

“
You’re
not sure?” he asked. “Of course
you’re
not sure! You haven’t been sure
of a single damned thing since I put you in charge of this investigation!”

The
Preceptor stalked over the flat screen and pointed at Cade’s image. “I’ll tell
you what you can be sure of,” he told Riley, a savage gleam in his eye. “This
son-of-a-bitch is finished!”

Johannson
turned to his assistant and said, “I want arrest orders issued for Williams
immediately. If he so much as lifts a finger toward another Templar they are free
to use deadly force to be certain that he doesn’t escape again.”

“On
what grounds?” Riley protested.

The
Preceptor turned to him and there was a definite sense of glee in the man’s
tone as he said, “Aiding and abetting the enemy. Otherwise known as treason.”

Riley
stared at him and thought,
God help us. He’s actually serious.

One
thing was for certain, this was not going to end well.

––––––––

T
he
object of Riley’s concern was at that moment less than twenty miles away, standing
in an all-but-empty bus station and staring at the row of lockers in front of
him. He was still dressed like a priest but he had left the sword and gun
behind in the rental car.

Wouldn’t
want to draw attention to myself
, he thought with wry amusement while holding
the four-thousand year old staff of a long dead court magician in one hand.

He
could feel the power radiating from the staff like the touch of some foul
creature on his skin and wanted nothing more than to be rid of it, but he was
struggling with the implications of letting it out of his sight.

In
the Egyptian pantheon Anubis had been the jackal-headed funerary god, the
guardian and protector of the dead. He held the scales of judgment and
determined the fate of the soul as it sought access to the afterlife. Unsurprisingly,
the staff’s primary use was as a tool for controlling the dead and by turning
it over to the Necromancer Cade knew that he would be increasing his enemy’s
strength and abilities tenfold.

On
the other hand, he really didn’t see what choice he had.

He’d
been surprised to find only two guards on duty when he’d entered the
reliquary. He’d been able to subdue one of them before they were aware of his
presence and had held the other at gunpoint while making him handcuff himself to
a nearby equipment console. After that it had been a simple matter to access
the inventory on the guard’s computer, determine what case the Staff of Anubis
had been stored in, and take it into his custody.

All
that was left at that point was to figure out a way out of the complex before
the guards were discovered and a nearby fire alarm had taken care of that issue
quite nicely. In the subsequent confusion he made his way back to the parking
garage, stolen a Suburban from the motor pool, and drove out of the commandery
with no one the wiser.

He
stopped at a nearby McDonalds to make the necessary call in regard to turning
over the staff to Simon Logan and received instructions by text ten minutes
later.

Take
the staff to the bus station and leave it in the locker, they said.

Which
was all well and good until Cade realized that he hadn’t been told which locker
and was then unable to reach Logan a second time to ask. Now he was standing
in the dimly lit station just after 11 p.m. staring at row after row of storage
lockers and wondering just which one was the right one.

Figuring
the Necromancer must have marked the locker in some way that he’d be able to
recognize, Cade triggered his Sight.

The
version of the bus station that existed in the Beyond was nearly swallowed in a
thick miasma of loneliness, fear and pain, of dreams broken and crushed beneath
the heel of the harsh reality of life, that threatened to overwhelm Cade’s
senses and send him wandering the real world in a fit of debilitating
depression. He fought against it, refusing to fall back into the
self-destruction and self-loathing that he had first experienced after his
wife’s tragic passing, and after a moment was able to reject the dismal
atmosphere of the Beyond for the alien thing it was.

With
the emotional influence of the Beyond now under control, he was able to look
around at the bus station’s darker half and suddenly he had his answer. One of
the lockers stood out from the rest, marked as it was with a glowing red
pentacle, or upward facing five pointed star, that was a common symbol of the
black arts.

Noting
its position, Cade cancelled his Sight and found himself back in the everyday
world. Keeping his gaze on the locker so he wouldn’t lose track of which one it
was, he walked over and opened it up.

Taped
to the back of the locker was an envelope with his name written on it in a
spidery hand.

Cade
propped the staff up inside the locker, pulled the envelope free and then tore
it open. Inside was a note.

Leave
the staff inside the locker and secure it behind you,
it read.
Wait for
new instructions.

Cade
did as he was told.

––––––––

R
iley
paced back and forth in the narrow confines of his office, trying to keep from
losing his cool. He was absolutely furious and had to resist the urge to smash
his desk chair against the wall or he’d have nothing to sit on. That arrogant
fool of a Preceptor was about to start a war with the wrong individual; Cade
would eat him alive and then come back for seconds. And they’d still be no
closer to finding the Necromancer than they were right now. It was insane! Riley
knew he had to do everything in his power to extricate the Order from the
situation before things totally went to hell.

He
had to find Cade before anyone else did.

But
how?

Work
the evidence
, his gut said. It was there, somewhere, the piece of the
puzzle he needed to blow this thing wide open and he just wasn’t seeing it
yet. Put the case together piece by piece and he was certain to see what he
had overlooked.

He’d
gotten more information out the Preceptor before he’d stalked out. Apparently
Cade had lured Fourth Squad’s commander, Sergeant Lyons, off the grounds to a
meeting in a local restaurant where he had somehow convinced Lyons to take him
back to the commandery and get him through security at the gate without anyone
recognizing who he was. That suggested he’d been wearing a disguise of some
kind, which in turn explained the outfit Cade had been wearing in the
surveillance video. Cade was a hiking boots, blue jeans, and t-shirt kind of
guy and the outfit he’d had on had looked more like a clerk or custodian’s
uniform.

Lyons
had been injected with a combination of drugs Riley recognized as being
standard issue for interrogation purposes and had been left to sleep it off in
an empty office down the hall from the reliquary. Aside from the injury to his
pride, Lyons was unharmed. Hopefully he could confirm some of their assumption
when he woke up from his chemically-induced nap.

After
bypassing security, Cade had overpowered the two men working inside the
reliquary and had stolen a single item, the Staff of Anubis. He had then returned
to ground level of the commandery and had pulled the nearest fire alarm,
slipping outside with the crowd without being recognized.

It
had been a simple yet elegant plan and it had been executed with precision.

Typical
Cade, in other words.

It
seemed clear to Riley that Cade was intentionally trying to keep from injuring
those he encountered. Cade had warned him off. Lyons had been drugged. The
guards in the reliquary had been knocked unconscious. With the exception of
Brother Samuel at the French monastery – and Riley was convinced the
seriousness of that injury had been entirely accidental – no one had come to
any serious harm.

It
was a marked contrast to the trail of bodies the Necromancer would have left in
his wake and Riley for one was glad that it was Cade who was collecting the
artifacts and not Logan.

That
line of thought brought Riley to the relics themselves. The hand of a
Christian saint and a staff that legend said was connected to the Egyptian
deity Anubis. At first glance they didn’t seem to have anything in common, but
upon closer examination into the background of each item it was clear that both
had been used not only to interact with the dead but also to bring the dead
back to life.

Logan’s
power was already considerable, he knew. Riley had seen first-hand the kind of
forces that Logan could raise to do his bidding, from revenants to corpse
hounds to demons from the very planes of Hell itself. He could call the dead
to get up and walk again any time he liked.
What good would the Hand or
Staff do him?

That
was the question of the hour in Riley’s mind.

Logan
had gone after the items almost immediately after escaping from Templar
custody. That showed he’d been thinking about the process for some time and
that it wasn’t pure happenstance. He not only wanted them, but he
needed
them for something.

But
what?

Perhaps
they’re a focus,
Riley thought. A way of taking the Necromancer’s powers
and boosting them beyond his current abilities. Like an amplifier of some
kind.

The
idea was a reasonable one and Riley decided to run with it, see where it took
him.

Okay,
he thought.
If the relics are intended
to boost his abilities, to give him more power, then what did he need that
power for?

Or
perhaps more specifically, what was he trying to raise that required that much
power?

The
answer, when it came to him, sent a chill up his spine.

––––––––

T
he
new instructions reached Cade before he was even out of the parking lot and he
realized that he’d never be able to hear the particular chime of his phone
again without being overcome with near-murderous intent.

He
dug the phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen.

Cade
stared at the tiny message and suddenly understood, beyond the shadow of a
doubt, just what it was that the Necromancer intended to do. He’d suspected it
when the first request had come to him, had that suspicion grow into belief
after retrieving the Staff, and now there seemed to be little doubt that he was
correct. The message confirmed it.

It
also told him something else.

Logan
wanted him to know what he was up to.

It
was right there, in between the lines of his latest message, a gauntlet thrown
down to see if Cade was up to the challenge, daring him to try to stop what was
about to happen.

Cade
felt his blood start to boil at the thought.

There
was no way he could walk away now.

The
two of them had been on a collision course since the day this had all begun
many years before, two moons orbiting a dark star on intersecting trajectories
that would one day eventually bring them slamming into each other at incredible
speeds.

That
day, it seemed, had finally come.

The
stakes had just been raised yet again and this time, Cade knew that there could
only be one outcome.

He
would stop the Necromancer or die trying.

It
was that simple.

Cade
drove out of the bus station and worked his way through the side streets until
he reached the highway. Once there he gunned the engine, sending the SUV
racing north toward the confrontation to come.