Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) (3 page)

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.