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 Shih 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.
The Preceptor shook his head, as if in disgust, but Riley didn’t rise to the bait. After a moment, Johannson said, “What news of the Adversary?”
Now, finally, he gets to what’s important.
But Riley didn’t have much better news on this topic either.
“We’ve had reports of several sightings but we’ve been unable to corroborate any of them. Our best bet is that our target has gone to ground, most likely to get used to the physical form it now controls.
“On the plus side, we’ve confirmed the death of Simon Logan and have recovered the Staff of Anubis.”
“So you’re not totally incompetent, is that what you’re telling me?” the Preceptor asked.
Riley wisely kept his mouth shut.
“Any word on who the woman was?”
Riley hesitated, but then decided the truth would serve him better than being evasive. The information was bound to come out at some point and it went a long way to explaining why Cade had acted the way he had.
“The woman was Gabrielle Williams, sir, the Knight Commander’s former wife.”
Johannson stared at him. ”Williams’ wife was killed several years ago.”
Riley nodded. ”That’s correct, sir.”
“Then how...?”
“We don’t know. Her body was there when we arrived and, given what happened, we didn’t have time to investigate further.”
Riley had no qualms about lying about Gabrielle, for he knew that if he told the truth Johannson would bring the Order’s inquisitors down on his head faster than he could blink. He’d helped Cade dig up Gabrielle’s grave, after all. He’d been there when his friend had levered the coffin open and found his wife’s still-warm body lying inside, without the slightest hint of corruption or decay, like a modern day Sleeping Beauty just waiting for her prince to come. Most other Templars would have assumed the body was being sustained by black arts and destroyed it immediately, but Riley hadn’t done anything of the sort. He’d ever helped Cade carry his wife’s body – Riley couldn’t bring himself to call it a corpse – to his vehicle and watched him drive off into the night. After all, it hadn’t been that long before that when Gabrielle herself had rescued Riley and the rest of the Echo Team when they’d been trapped in the Beyond by the angel Baraquel. He’d stared into her eyes and spoken directly to her; if there was even the slightest chance that her soul could be reunited with her body, Riley wasn’t going to be the one to stand in the way.
The Preceptor wasn’t so accommodating.
“Why am I only now hearing about this?”
Riley shrugged. ”I believe it was in my initial report.”
It wasn’t; he knew that. He’d intentionally left the woman’s identity out of it, but he also knew that Johannson wouldn’t remember one way or the other. If the Preceptor checked, and found out differently, then Riley would claim it was a simple oversight.
Johannson glared at him, as if the weight of his stare was going to cause Riley to suddenly break down and give up the truth.
Gonna take a lot more than what you’ve got to get me to break, Riley thought, as he gazed calmly back at the other man.
But then Preceptor surprised him.
“So help me understand this, Captain,” Johannson said. ”That night, at the warehouse, you entered the building and found both Commander Williams and the Necromancer inside together, along with the seemingly intact body of William’s dead wife?”
“Well, yes, but...”
The Preceptor talked right over him. ”And it never occurred to you that the reason this woman’s body was intact after being in the ground for the last five years was because the Necromancer had just used his sorcery to make it so?”
“What? No, it wasn’t...”
“And now both Williams and the Adversary, who, by the way is now using that suddenly intact body we were just talking about, have disappeared and YOU DON’T SEE A LINK BETWEEN THEM?!”
The Preceptor’s face was bright red by the time he had stopped shouting and for a moment Riley wondered if the man was going to have a heart attack. Before he could say anything, however, the Preceptor stabbed the intercom button on his desk and said, “Get me Operations” when his aide replied.
Uh oh, Riley thought.
The phone rang seconds later and Johannson snatched it up.
“Operations? This is Preceptor Johannson. I’m issuing shoot-on-sight orders for both the Adversary and former Knight Commander Cade Williams. Have a written copy prepared and sent to my office for immediate signature.”
Riley spoke up the moment the phone was back in its cradle. ”Sir! You can’t do that. Williams is a respected...”
“Shut up, Captain! That’s an order!” the Preceptor yelled, then slammed his palm on his desk to emphasis the point.
Riley’s mouth closed with a snap.
Into the silence, the Preceptor said, “I don’t know who you think you are, Captain, but don’t you dare presume to come into my office and tell me what I can or cannot do. Is that clear?”
“Sir.”
“Sir what?”
Gritting his teeth, Riley snapped to attention and then replied, “Sir, yes sir!”
“As of this moment both you and Echo are relieved. I’m reassigning Gamma Team to handle the search for Williams and the Adversary. You are to stand down and stay out of the way.”
Five minutes later Riley was headed for the barracks, determined to speak to as many of the men as possible before the alert spread through the ranks. Preceptor’s authorization or not, he intended to make it clear that anyone who used deadly force again Cade was going to have to deal with the Echo Team afterward.
If Cade left them alive, that was.
CHAPTER TWO
The man that was causing such a ruckus amidst the Templar ranks, Cade Williams, was at that moment nearly fifty miles away, standing in the shadows beneath a broken street lamp in New York City watching as a man and a woman walked arm-in-arm toward the entrance to a respectable hotel about three hundred feet ahead.
The man was unimportant; just some random John the woman had picked up not ten minutes before. It was the prostitute that Cade was after.
The woman wore a skintight dress as dark as midnight, which was a sharp contrast to her shoulder-length honey-blond hair, and high heels which helped accentuate her long legs and athletic figure. Both the dress and the shoes were designed to draw the eye of potential customers and to keep them from looking too closely at the rest of the package. If the woman’s make-up was laid on a bit too heavily to hide certain peculiarities on her skin or if her nails were just a bit longer and thicker - more like claws really - than one might normally expect, her new John hadn’t noticed when she’d picked him out of a crowd at the bar she’d been waiting in. Nor had it taken much for her to entice him into joining her back at her hotel for a quick drink be
fore getting into other, more interesting, and certainly more carnal, activities. Cade had noticed both those things though and had been more than a little aware of the entire predatory atmosphere that surrounded her selection of her most recent mark. After all, he understood her true nature. He’d encountered her peripherally during the course of an investigation several months earlier and had been too consumed in his search for his target at the time to give her much thought.
But now times were different.
He’d been watching her for the last two hours, ever since she’d arrived at the bar, waiting for the chance to make his move. When she latched on to her latest victim, he knew his patience was about to pay off in spades.
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 l
ast 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.
Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) Page 2
