Templar Chronicles: Judgment Day Part 1

JUDGMENT DAY.

Joseph Na.s.sise.

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.

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 sh.e.l.l 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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sengers 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 cla.s.sic 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 pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed up the Staff of Anubis and power flashed again, surrounding him in a sickly black corona of arcane energy that seemed to s.h.i.+ft 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 rea.s.sure 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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, smas.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sing.

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 d.a.m.ned 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-a.s.s with a G.o.d 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-a.s.s Dennison, would have been better than here.

The last two weeks had been sheer h.e.l.l 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 bulls.h.i.+t 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+h 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.