War Hammer: A Nate Temple Supernatural Thriller Book 8 (The Temple Chronicles)

by Shayne Silvers

  If my plan worked, it would be a victory smoke.

  If it didn’t, it would be a remembrance smoke.

  Either way, I wanted to enjoy at least a taste of it.

  I puffed contentedly, absorbing the flavor. It was excellent. I appreciated the momentary silence around me. It was a strange sensation after so many months of the property being full of hundreds of people. Now, it was just me. Unless Dean had also ignored my orders to leave.

  I pondered the situation, wondering exactly what had ignited it all tonight. Someone had invited us to meet at the Arch, and it seemed like that someone was Matthias – all so that he would have a minute to do whatever he intended with the Knight that Van Helsing had found. Whatever that was about, it had made Van very nervous, and Matthias very excited.

  But… Matthias had tried to lure me to England, so that didn’t make any sense.

  I shook my head as a Gateway ripped open the air underneath the giant white tree, directly before me. Matthias stepped out, and let out a growl as he stared me down.

  “Might want to move to the left a few steps,” I offered, puffing my cigar until a cloud of smoke surrounded me. I reached into myself until I felt that strange, golden power fill me, illuminating my veins, and making the cloud seem to glow.

  Then I smiled, knowing my eyes were also glowing as I stared through the cloud at a frowning Matthias.

  “That’s where Icky got… well, smoked,” I elaborated, shrugging with a light laugh.

  Matthias’ face purpled as he took an angry step closer, eyeing my chair with a frown. It was rather bizarre to be sitting in a chair in the middle of the grass with no one else around.

  I let him stew on that.

  “Where is Castor?” he asked, eyes darting about, anticipating a trap. “I know you’re working with him.”

  I stared at him for a few seconds, and then burst out laughing. “Why in the living hell would you think that? He wanted to kill me!”

  Matthias grunted doubtfully, and then he cut off, his eyes locking onto mine. “Wanted?” he asked, noticing my emphasis on the past tense.

  I nodded. “I took care of him before I met up with you. But you know all about that, sending us those boxes with the cards,” I added, waving a hand as if that was unimportant.

  But I watched his eyes. And they looked… concerned.

  “You got one as well?” he asked, sounding surprised. “It must have been Castor…”

  I shook my head. “He thought it was you, since you didn’t show up at the Arch.”

  He frowned. “Mine didn’t say to go to the Arch…”

  My skin grew suddenly cold. What exactly was going on here?

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s time for you to pay for what you did. You killed my so—”

  And with a thunderous cawing sound, two giant ravens swooped down from the titanic white tree, slamming into Matthias and knocking him into the trunk.

  I jumped to my feet, stunned. “What the fuck?” I shouted.

  “What the fuck, indeed,” Castor Queen rasped, appearing out of thin air a dozen paces between Matthias and I.

  I flinched in horror, staring at him. He resembled a discarded collection of barbecued ribs. Bone showed through in several places, and what was left of his skin was blackened or oozing. Like a fucking zombie. But even as I watched, he was struggling to heal himself, the skin slowly – ever so slowly – growing back.

  Some places on his body were beyond repair, too much of him simply missing.

  For example, he had a hole in one of his cheeks, revealing his molars. The skin had healed around it, but left the gaping hole. I shivered, wanting to simply put him out of his misery. I heard bones cracking, and he spasmed occasionally as he turned from me to Matthias, who was lying on the ground, panting. The ravens were standing on his chest, and screaming at him, but he didn’t wave them away.

  Instead, he twitched, moaned, and rocked, writhing on the floor at the base of the tree.

  Castor glanced back at me. “Should have seen that coming. You’re tied to Odin,” he said, jerking his chin at my palm. “Like your Crest.”

  I glanced down at it instinctively, but didn’t say anything. I was pretty sure I wasn’t tied to Odin, because those asshole birds showed zero respect for me, and neither had Odin. If my family was tied to him, I had never heard about it, and after meeting him recently, I was pretty sure he would have told me if I owed him forgotten allegiance.

  “Either way, I’m going to kill you much slower than I intended. Because some of this is permanent,” he snarled, pointing his nub at his face.

  “Which part is permanent? I didn’t see which finger you were pointing with,” I said, motioning at his stump. He snarled, taking an aggressive step forward.

  With a shout, Matthias jumped to his feet, eyes wild. They locked onto mine, and I held my breath. He didn’t look harmed, but he did look homicidal. What the hell had Hugin and Munin done to him?

  “You… were on the Pavilion…” he whispered, tears streaming down his face as he stared at me in utter disbelief.

  I swallowed, not wanting to do a single thing to interrupt this cobweb of a chance. I very slowly nodded, realizing what Odin’s ravens had done. Thought and Memory had shown Matthias the truth. Because they had been on the pavilion when I fought Athena. They knew I had been nowhere near Ichabod, and since they were about as unbiased as one could get, Matthias just might buy it. Also, I was hoping that since they were on our Crest, that he possibly held a mystical sense of superstition about them. That they were tied to our family, and were possibly intervening before Temple accidentally killed Temple.

  Or his mind was about to break at the complexity of it all, and we were all going to die.

  Pick one of those.

  His head swiveled to Castor Queen, and his face was as blank as a tombstone. “How could you?” he whispered.

  Castor – someone who I was beginning to believe was more than one-hundred-percent asshole – suddenly let out a deflated sigh, and his healing abruptly stopped. “The Syndicate was mine. He took it from me. I wanted him to hurt for that. I knew you’d eventually come after me, so I turned you against each other.”

  “I’ve got a question,” I said, frowning at Castor, wondering why he had stopped healing. “How are you still alive? Not just now – although that’s fucking with my head a little – but in general. I didn’t think Makers were immortal.”

  He shook his head as if disgusted that he was even having to talk to me. “Makers can be whatever they want. It all depends on how you work with your Beast…” He let out a long, tired breath. “For example, like I have these past few hundred years. I never fully merged with him, but it had a side effect you’re about to witness.”

  Matthias sucked in a breath. “You didn’t…”

  Castor gave him a sad nod. “I had a good run, but now it’s time for him to taste freedom.” Matthias hissed as Castor turned to me. “You see, in exchange for a long life and help in taking control of the Syndicate, I promised my Beast that he would be freed upon my death…” He glanced down at himself, pointing out that his healing had stopped. “I tried to heal myself. I really did,” he muttered, glancing at Matthias with another sad smile. “It was wrong, I know, but you always got all the credit…”

  “Castor, you fool,” Matthias cursed, seeing his friend for the first time. “How long do we have?” he asked.

  “What the hell is going on?” I snapped.

  The two old dudes ignored me. Castor looked up at Matthias, coughing up blood. “Not long,” he sputtered, coughing more violently.

  Matthias turned to me, his eyes wide with terror. “When he dies, his Beast will be free. You better have one hell of a weapon on you, boy, or neither of us are going live to see the sun rise.”

  Chapter 51

  I slowly turned to Castor, watching him die before my eyes, and realizing that I done fucked up. He had turned himself into a martyr – a suicide bomber. I could tell that Matthias wanted to
rush to his old friend’s side, despite their past, but he didn’t dare get close to the bomb that was about to blow. I wasn’t entirely sure why they were so scared of Castor’s Beast being freed, because I had freed mine, and the world hadn’t imploded.

  Still, when Makers were scared of something, it was best to listen.

  For example, Hugin and Munin were suddenly hauling ass, screaming as they flapped as hard as they could, as far away as possible from me and the two Makers. Which didn’t fill me with a whole lot of confidence.

  Castor crashed to his knees, coughing violently. He struggled to speak, and managed one last phrase that made my blood curdle.

  “The one thing he wants over all else is…” he hacked nastily, spitting up something, “Falco.”

  Then Castor Queen died, and all was right with the world.

  The end.

  Well, okay, not really. Not at all, in fact.

  As Castor’s body crashed to the ground, a dark stain rose up from his corpse, a shifting, smoky apparition, the color of a deep bruise. It lifted its arms high above its head as if stretching. Then it began to laugh. A deep, sinister, foreboding giggle of profound glee.

  Which doesn’t sound like it would be scary.

  But a giggle can make you ruin your pants if employed by the right kind of psychopath.

  And this one must have been practicing for a few thousand years.

  Because I almost had to call a time-out for a wardrobe change as the sound made my arms instantly pebble with gooseflesh.

  Matthias didn’t move an inch, staring in horror at the rising form of Castor’s Beast – which was easily as large as Gunnar had been on the Fae Side. It turned from Matthias to me, eyes of white fire against the purple bruise color.

  “Oh, this shall be fun. The Temples, offering up their sacred Beast. Falco…” he purred, staring past me toward the house, eyes flaring brighter for a moment. “You will be—”

  He cut off abruptly, and stopped moving. Completely stopped, as if I was looking at a two-dimensional picture of what I had seen only a moment ago.

  “SHE. WAS. MIIIIINE!” he suddenly roared, and I had to clasp my hands to my ears to prevent my head from exploding like a melon.

  The form was suddenly moving, sliding back and forth as if pacing, cursing and muttering in a language I didn’t know. Then he froze, and his eyes locked onto the tree.

  I knew he was staring at the tree, because Matthias had instantly Shadow Walked a dozen paces away, expecting an attack, and the Beast’s gaze didn’t follow him.

  I frowned.

  “You…” Castor’s Beast snarled, eyes flashing dangerously.

  To be completely honest, this next part was improvisation. Sure, I had originally schemed with Kai, but I hadn’t anticipated anything like this. But since the situation suddenly seemed even worse than we had anticipated, I took this as my cue.

  “The bullshit stops when the hammer drops!” I shouted, and threw my war hammer with every iota of power I could muster, directly at my tree.

  It struck the massive trunk like a grenade in a pond, ripping entirely through it.

  And Kai exploded out from within – not in human form – but as a green cloud infused with golden glitter – drawing the power from my war hammer.

  Kai flew at Castor’s Beast and the earth sunk a good foot lower for a dozen paces on impact as the tree erupted in flames and began to fall. It crashed to the ground in an explosion of embers as flames roared to life, burning much too bright and fast for any normal fire.

  Because I had remembered one thing about the tree. It doubled as a Gateway to Fae, and I hadn’t really wanted that on my property anymore, just in case the Queens held a grudge about me annihilating their army. But it had been Kai’s idea. He had known I wouldn’t stand a chance against two Makers and had wanted to help in any way he could.

  I stared, transfixed as the two clouds of light slammed into each other with great peals of thunder filling the skies and shaking the earth.

  Two entirely free Beasts going head-to-head.

  “She was to have my child!” Castor’s Beast raged.

  “She chose better, Maru. But anyone would have been better than you,” Kai’s voice boomed back – like laughing thunder, not sounding remotely afraid.

  Maru… the name of Castor’s Beast?

  And then physics grew kind of… fluid, and I Shadow Walked to a really safe distance as the two Beasts began flinging magic around like I had never before imagined, and I had seen quite a bit in my day.

  Even the part of me that had been Wylde stared in wonder, like a child seeing a magician for the first time. But magic that was so beyond your scope of understanding that your mind kind of fragmented to even accept the fact that what you were seeing was real, let alone how.

  Great big monsters, twenty feet tall, suddenly appeared, tearing into each other, matching the color of their masters. Maru’s bruise-colored challenger sliced down, missing Kai’s gold and green construct, and instead tore a dozen feet down into the earth as if it were made of paper. Then the two began to fight in earnest as Kai and Maru let their creations do as they would, literally ripping each other – and my beautiful lawn – to shreds. The tree roared with flame behind them.

  Kai cast a ten-story pillar of flame at Maru. The bruise-colored apparition winked out of existence for a second as the flame roared through where he had been hovering, burning itself out after scorching a ten-yard swath of my lawn.

  Maru reappeared and flung out a hand. The two warring creatures exploded into a bazillion fragments that disappeared just as quickly as they had been shattered.

  And then… flashes of light, dark, colors, explosions… Listen, I can’t even find the words to describe it because the human language doesn’t possess them.

  I lost track of what happened before me, and I would have immediately worshipped any god who strolled by – promising to worship him or her until the end of my days – if they could guarantee that the last few minutes were wiped from my mind.

  Unable to comprehend what was going on, I just stared, eyes vacant, choosing merely to observe rather than understand what I was seeing.

  After an indeterminable amount of time watching the titans play, Kai’s gold and green form tore through Maru, and the earth cracked for a hundred paces all around them at his death scream.

  One of those chasms reached me, the earth splitting between my legs, opening up into nothingness, and I began to fall.

  A fist latched onto my shirt, tugging me back from the crevice.

  I crashed on top of him, and rolled away, eyes wild to suddenly find myself involved in the chaos. Matthias stared back at me, looking surprised that he had saved me. Then he climbed to his knees, staring past me. I turned to see ribbons of the bruise-colored Beast floating up into the air, disintegrating the higher they rose. I stared at the ground below it to see the dark-skinned Egyptian dude from earlier lying motionless on the grass.

  Kai.

  I scrambled to my feet, and was running towards him without considering the consequences.

  I skidded to a halt, staring down at him. He was battered to hell, and covered in blood. Where his wounds were most grotesque, I didn’t see organs inside his body, but instead only gold and green smoke against a black background, like I was staring into some celestial body. Kai grunted, staring up at me. Then he smiled.

  “Took care of that bastard,” he grunted. “Our plan almost went to hell at the end, but it all worked out.” Then he glanced over my shoulder, face grimacing. I turned to see Matthias staring down at Kai with profound sadness in his eyes. “Temple shall not harm Temple,” he commanded.

  With barely a hesitation, Matthias nodded.

  Probably knowing that even as wounded as he was, Kai could make short order of him if he chose to do so.

  “You did well, Kai,” I whispered, trying to kick-start my brain. “I didn’t expect any of this, but your plan was solid. We’d all be dead without you,” I admitted.

&
nbsp; “Thanks to your War Hammer,” he grunted painfully. We had planned to lure the Makers here, where hopefully Kai or Falco could finish them off if I couldn’t do so myself. Beast versus Beast in the cage-match of the century.

  I hadn’t known it would literally come to that, though. And now my friend was dying. “What was he talking about with Falco, Kai?” I asked. “And what do you need? How can I help you?”

  Kai grunted, coughing violently. “I’m done for. Don’t worry about that.” He took a breath, closing his eyes as he smiled. “I… got it on,” he whispered, sounding like the smuggest son of a bitch that had ever existed.

  I blinked at him, and then arched a brow at Matthias, hoping he had understood. He shrugged, frowning down at Kai. “What?” I asked, turning back to him.

  “The love song,” he admitted, opening his eyes to stare at me. “I was trying to woo her.” I felt a presence behind me, and turned to see a silver mist pouring out of Chateau Falco, quivering in agitation. “I wish we could have had longer,” Kai told the mist. “But you will carry my name with you, now…” he said breathlessly.

  I blinked, brain emitting weak sparks of confusion. “Falco?” I whispered.

  Yes… she said in an anguished voice.

  Matthias stared in awe, as if seeing God for the first time. I even spotted a tear on his cheeks. He had grown up with her, spent his life with her, but I guessed he had never seen her with his own eyes before.

  “What are you talking about, Kai?” I asked nervously. When he didn’t answer, I turned, fearing he was already gone. He had tears in his eyes, and each of those drops throbbed with golden light, like mini universes. Like my veins. And my War Hammer.

  “Falco’s pregnant. I always wanted a child of my own…” Kai said wistfully. “You have a baby Beast on the way, Temple. Take care of him for me?” he pleaded, face full of pain.

  I nodded, feeling tears of my own streaming down my cheeks. “Of course… Falco and I will take care of your son,” I promised, even though I had no way of knowing if it would be a son.