Jack Templar and the Lord of the Demons (The Jack Templar Chronicles Book 5) (8 page)

Draxo’s face darkened, but he had his composure. For now. “Vampires always are a little stuck-up and pretentious,” he said. “Looks like you picked that up easily enough. I hope you’ll be this much fun in the arena.”

“The arena? You mean to have her fight?” I asked.

Draxo laughed so hard that he had trouble breathing. “Not just her, Templar. The two of you. Against one another.” Then his voice lowered and he turned deadly serious. “To the death.”

H
e stood
and waved over two of the minotaur guards standing nearby. They snapped to attention, their axes at the ready, and took up positions on either side of us.

“Wait,” I said. “There has to be some other way we can come to an agreement.”

“The problem with ruling a mob of cut-throats, outlaws, and outcasts is that you have to keep them entertained,” Draxo said. “It will be the Games of the century.”

He made a signal, and the curtains between us and the party in the hall beyond were pulled open. The minotaur guards shoved us forward, and Draxo walked behind us. The music stopped and the room fell silent.

“Friends,” Draxo shouted, holding his hand over his head. “I have great news.” He dragged the tension out, waiting, the perfect showman.

Finally a hoarse creach voice catcalled from the crowd, “We get to eat ’em?”

Laughter rolled through the hall, and Draxo smiled. “No, even better. You get to watch them fight!”

The hall erupted in cheers, grunts, and roars of delight.

“Two monster hunters,” Draxo continued. He pointed to Eva. “She was once called the Hand of Death.” Several boos rose from the crowd. Draxo nodded in sympathy. “Perhaps some here have had family done in at the end of her blade or even felt that blade themselves. But look at this.” He grabbed her left hand and raised it up in the air for the crowd to see. “She has her hand back.”

“Then she can’t be da Hand ’a Death, now can she?” called out another voice in the crowd.

“You’d be right,” Draxo cried out. “Only she’s been turned into a vampire by Shakra, the Lord of the Vampires herself!”

I had to hand it to the ugly ogre, he certainly knew his audience. They went absolutely nuts at the information that Eva was now a Creach.

“Who’s the boy?” grunted a goblin in the front row. “More Black Guard scum?”

Draxo walked behind me and placed a hand over my head. “Who’s this?” he asked. “Do you really want to know?”

The mob yelled and stamped their feet.

“I can’t hear you!” Draxo shouted.

The hall vibrated from the noise. Draxo soaked it up like a rock star working a crowded stadium. Finally, he put his hands up and the mob fell silent.

“Because I love you all so much,” Draxo said. “Because I always deliver bigger and better spectacles, I have brought you …” – he strung it out before shouting at the top of his lungs – “JACK TEMPLAR THE MONSTER HUNTER.”

The crowd went absolutely berserk. The sound was deafening. I could have sworn the beasts in the front row were randomly biting arms and legs around them in the frenzy. I looked over at Draxo and saw he was drinking in the energy from the crowd. But when I looked at Eva, I saw that she was staring at me.

Draxo leaned down toward us and said in a voice only we could hear, “Whoever wins will be released with your friends and given the location of a gate to the Underworld. But it will be a fight to the best of your ability. If you refuse to fight, if I feel it’s faked in any way, or if one of you lets the other win, I feed the rest of your friends to the mob. Understand?”

“Draxo, this is ridiculous,” I said. “There has to be another way. There has to be something else you want.”

“You have one hour to prepare,” Draxo said. He raised his voice to the crowd. “The Games will begin in one hour!”

The minotaur shoved us toward a door nearby, and we marched out with the crowd bellowing and shouting behind us.

Once we were in the hallway, the *minotaurs shackled our hands behind our backs with heavy bands of steel joined by thick chains. It appeared our reputations preceded us, and they weren’t taking any risks while transporting us. I turned to Eva. “What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?” she asked. “We’re going to fight to the best of our abilities.”

“To the death?” I whispered back. “Are you crazy?”

The minotaur guarding us grunted something in a language I didn’t understand. Well, I didn’t understand the actual words. It was clear that he was telling us to shut up.

Eva quickened her pace so she pulled in front of me as the hallway narrowed. Soon, it angled downward, and the walls turned from painted plaster to roughhewn natural rock. The air turned stale and damp. The smell of moldy hay wafted up from down below.

“So much for Draxo’s hospitality,” I murmured.

We took a long flight of stairs down, the way lit by flickering torches held to the walls with heavy metal brackets. The oily smoke that hung to the blackened ceiling made my eyes sting. As always happened when I entered a dungeon or jail of any kind, I thought of my father locked away in Ren Lucre’s dungeons for the past fourteen years.

I wondered if I were to rescue him someday, just how much of the man would be left to rescue. Already I felt my spirits dampen and doubt fill me as we walked deeper into the bowels of the underground warren. And that was after only a few minutes. I shuddered at the thought of fourteen years in a place like this.

It was a good reminder of what I was fighting for. Although the Jerusalem Stones were the key to stopping Ren Lucre’s armies, what really drove me was freeing my father. That and turning Eva and Daniel back into their human forms too. Bottom line, there was a lot riding on navigating through the problem Draxo had just dropped in our laps.

Finally, the minotaur guard came to a thick metal door, inserted a key, and pulled it open.

The second he did, Will launched from the door, yelling at the top of his lungs. Daniel was right behind him.

They hit the minotaur with all their might … and bounced off him, not even making him rock back on his heels.

Will and Daniel hit the floor and looked up to see the sharp end of the minotaur’s ax pointed at them. The minotaurs had been right to chain Eva and me. This would have been the perfect time to attack, grab our friends, and get the heck out of there. But with our hands tied behind our backs, there wasn’t anything we could do.

Unless your name was Eva, that is.

A flash of movement, no more than a shadow seen in the corner of my eye, and then Eva was on the minotaur’s back. Her chained hands now in front of her, she used the chain between the shackles as a choker wrapped around the minotaur’s thick neck.

The beast raised his ax, balancing it to swing backward to try to hit Eva. He swung hard, but Eva was ready for it and moved at the last second. The ax sank into the top of the minotaur’s own head. Its eyes opened wide in surprise, then fluttered shut as it slumped to the ground.

“Strong, but not too smart,” Eva said, picking up the ax.

The other minotaur blocked the passage behind us, holding his weapon across his body. He didn’t look too worried about his comrade. In fact, he didn’t look too worried about anything.

He roared twice, and a goblin war cry instantly came from the room Will and Daniel had just left.

“Wait, don’t shoot,” came T-Rex’s voice.

“Help!” came Xavier’s high-pitched plea.

“Guys,” I shouted. “Can you run out here?”

“Uh … I don’t think that’s a good idea,” T-Rex yelled.

Daniel ducked his head back into the room. When he reappeared, I didn’t like the look on his face.

“The cell has a cage for a ceiling with a room above that’s full of goblin archers,” Daniel said. “If they move, they’re dead.”

From the way Eva had handled the first minotaur, and now with the dead beast’s ax in our possession, I knew we could take the remaining creach and make our escape – without our friends.

“Jack, are you there?” T-Rex called, his voice trembling. “These guys look serious.”

Eva met my eye. “They die now or one of us does an hour from now in Draxo’s arena,” she said. “We have to choose.”

“Jack!” T-Rex called again.

“I can’t leave him,” I said to Eva. “You know I can’t.”

Eva white-knuckled the ax, twisting it in her hands. Finally, she nodded. “Neither can I.” She threw the ax to the ground, turned, and walked into the cell.

Will and Daniel shook their heads as they greeted me.

“Sorry,” Daniel said. “We should have made sure T-Rex and Xavier came out with us.”

“Thought they’d be safer in the cell,” Will added. We walked into the dank room together and saw eight goblin archers poised over us on the metal grid that served as both our ceiling and the floor for the room above. Their bows were pulled back and their black, barbed arrows trained on each of us as we moved around the room. “So much for that idea,” Will said. “When we made plans, there wasn’t anybody up there.”

The minotaur tossed in a set of keys for our shackles, then slammed the door behind us and locked it. The second he did, the goblin archers eased their arrows back and scrambled away, leaving us alone.

T-Rex ran over and gave me a hug, nearly knocking me over since my hands were still behind my back. “Thanks, Jack. I know you could have escaped.”

I grinned. “Are you kidding? There was a giant minotaur out in the hall. It was safer back in here.” I nodded to the keys on the ground. “Can you grab those?”

T-Rex unbound me and then Eva. Together, we quickly explained to the group what had happened with Draxo. When I got to the final conditions of Draxo’s demand, especially that the fight had to be to the death, gasps filled the room.

“But that’s not possible,” Xavier said, sounding very young and afraid. “You can’t do that.”

“I take Draxo at his word,” I said. “If we don’t do it, I mean really fight, then he says he’ll kill the rest of you.”

It’d crossed my mind not to tell them the repercussions if Eva and I didn’t deliver a real fight, but I thought they deserved to know the truth. Still, saying the actual words sounded harsh. Even Will and Daniel glanced up to where the archers had been minutes earlier. It wouldn’t be hard for Draxo to deliver on his threat.

“Xavier, anything?” I asked. He was the smartest of our group. If there was a creative way out of the mess we were in, it was likely to come from him.

Xavier shook his head. “We’ve tested the bars above us. They are structurally sound, embedded right into the rock. There are no drains larger than a fist. We’ve investigated every square inch of the walls looking for any hidden passages that might exist. Nothing.”

“The only weakness is the door,” Will said. “It’s the only way in or out.”

“The Templar Ring,” I said, suddenly excited. “It’s opened doors for us before, remember? In the Cave of Trials. Then the drain in Marrakech. It doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try.”

“We thought of that,” Daniel said. “I tried to open the door. Tried pressing the ring against it. Nothing.”

“Maybe Jack has to be wearing it,” Will offered.

There was an awkward pause in the air. We all knew that taking the ring off Daniel was a risk. If he turned into a werewolf with all of us in that enclosed room together, who knew what would happen?

“Oh, give him the ring,” Eva finally said. “I’ll stand behind you and break your neck if you start to transform.”

I thought she was kidding at first, but one look at her and I knew she was deadly serious.

“How about you all hold him down, and if he starts to turn, I just slip the ring back on him?”

Eva shrugged. “I guess that could work too.”

Daniel didn’t need any convincing. He lay down face-first on the rock floor and spread his arms and legs. Will and Eva each took an arm, and T-Rex and Xavier sat on his legs. “Let’s get this over with. The sooner we get that door open, the sooner we can get out of here.”

I reached out and put my hand on the Templar Ring. Checking with each of the others, I got a nod from each that they were ready.

I pulled the ring off Daniel and slid it on my finger. Warmth passed through me, the way taking a drink of hot chocolate feels on a cold day. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the ring until the second I put it on.

“Jack, hurry,” Eva hissed.

Looking down, I saw Daniel’s body flexing as if he was straining under a great weight. I ran to the door and placed both of my hands on it. I closed my eyes, craving the feeling of the ring’s energy. But nothing came. There was no heat. No vibration. No
clank
of the door’s lock being thrown open. Just cold iron pressing against the palms of my hands.

Daniel groaned behind me, but I ignored it.

“C’mon,” I murmured to the ring. “Open this thing.”

I closed my eyes tighter and tried to will the door open.

“Jack!” Eva called.

Another groan behind me, this one deeper, more menacing.

“Please open,” I begged. “Help us.”

The groan turned into a snarl.

“Jack!” Will shouted. “He’s turning.”

I pounded on the door, hitting the metal with the ring. “Open!”

Nothing happened.

“We can’t hold him!” Will called. “Jack, now!”

I spun around, immediately fearing that I’d waited too long. Daniel’s body jerked and bucked like he was possessed. Eva and Will held on for dear life, pressing their knees into Daniel’s shoulders. Eva, with her vampire strength, was certainly doing a better job than Will who was getting thrashed around, but even she was having trouble. A second after I turned around, Daniel kicked out the leg Xavier was holding and sent the young hunter flying through the air.

I ran toward the side where Eva held Daniel’s arm. She grunted from the effort. I pulled off the Templar Ring and grabbed at Daniel’s hand. It was like a claw now, cutting through the air. I moved position to get a better angle and caught a look at his face. It wasn’t yet a wolf, but his eyes were solid black, and sharp teeth pushed out from behind his lips.

“Hold him steady!” I shouted.

“I’m trying,” Eva yelled. “Get the ring on him!”

I tried to get his hand, but he fought me, pulling away every time I got the ring close.

“I can’t get it on,” I yelled.

Daniel braced himself, pulling his legs in and pushing his hands against the rock floor. He was standing up.

“Hold on!” T- Rex shouted.

T-Rex rolled off the leg he was holding, jumped up in the air, and tucked into a ball like he was doing a cannonball dive into a pool. He landed right in the middle of Daniel’s back, making him collapse to the floor.