What he didn’t expect was what he got, which was nothing.
Or next to nothing, actually. The blade soaked up the blood that spilled across it as if it was a man dying of thirst in the Gobi desert, but that was all.
No spectacular explosions of mystical power.
No scream of defiance as the Adversary was pulled from Gabrielle’s body.
Uriel’s words whispered unbidden in his mind.
You must either slash the Adversary’s throat or plunge the knife into its heart.
No.
He couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t do that.
This had to work.
But after another minute, when nothing else happened, Cade was faced with the realization that it would not.
Involuntarily, Cade glanced up into the Adversary’s eyes and found the creature laughing at him.
The Adversary knew.
Knew he could no more take that knife and plunge it in his wife’s heart than he could shove it into his own.
Knew that the binding would not hold it for much longer. Knew that when the binding failed, the Adversary would be free to escape to continue its plan once more.
Knew that Cade had failed.
It was too much for Cade to handle. He could feel his mental defenses starting to crumble, the barriers that he had erected to keep himself sane and functioning in the face of all that he had done and witnessed in the days since first encountering the fallen angel collapsing inward as if under assault from a relentless foe, and in a last-ditch effort born of despair and frustration Cade did something he hadn’t done in years.
Cade turned his face upward into the night sky and cried out in agony.
“What have we done to deserve this? Why have you abandoned us? Abandoned me?”
There was, of course, no answer.
Cade hadn’t actually expected one; he just couldn’t think of anything else to do.
He dropped to his knees before the still frozen form of the fallen angel before him and waited for the binding to wear off and the end to come. If he could not save Gabrielle then he would not save himself either.
It would end here, for better or worse.
The sound started softly at first, a gentle hum at the edge of his hearing, but it built swiftly, growing louder and rising in pitch, forcing him to cover his ears in pain and still it continued.
Cade had heard the sound twice before, knew what was about to make its appearance, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Nothing mattered in the face of his failure to rescue Gabrielle.
The sound built and built and built again, growing louder and more piercing until when he thought he couldn’t possibly endure it any more...silence fell.
Cade looked up to find the seven standing before him, just as they had on previous occasions, shiny with the glory of the Almighty that, if asked, Cade would have told you he was hard-pressed to believe in.
The leader stepped forward and for the first time there was a sense of urgency in his voice.
“Son of Adam, you must finish what you have started.”
Cade shook his head.
“I can’t,” he said wearily.
He stared down at the knife in his hands and felt despair fill his heart.
“You must!”
Cade offered the weapon to the angel without looking up. “Take it. Do it. I cannot.”
“No one else can wield the weapon. You must do as Uriel commanded if you wish to put an end to this.”
“I can’t, damn you!” he screamed.
“You do not understand the horror to...”
Cade surged to his feet and rushed forward, brandishing Gabriel’s Tear as if he intended to use it on the angel standing before him.
“No, you don’t understand!” He pointed the blade at the thing hanging there beside them, the thing that wore his wife’s body like a child wore a Halloween costume, and shouted his defiance in the angel’s face.
“Somewhere in there my wife still holds on, still fights to free herself from that bastard’s grip. Killing the Adversary means killing her as well and I will not do that to the one I love more than life itself! I am not God and I will not make that choice!”
He turned, about to hurl the Tear over the edge of the roof, when a voice brought him up short.
“Cade?”
He spun around to face the Adversary...and found himself addressing Gabrielle.
Her face had changed – her features were less severe, her eyes had returned to their natural color – and she was smiling at him in a way he had longed to see her smile for so very, very long.
But her next words were a horror unto themselves.
“You must do this, Cade.”
He shook his head as he stared at her with tear-filled eyes. Did she not understand the horror of what she was asking him to do? He would rather take his own life...
The binding must have been starting to wear off, for she gestured with one hand for him to come closer.
Cade did so.
“Take my hand, husband.”
With the Tear still held in his right hand, Cade reached out to her with his left.
The minute their hands met the visions swept over them like a tsunami, drowning them beneath their weight, image after image of the two of them ruling over a blasted wasteland with bloody hunger and an iron fist. People were nothing more than pawns in their grasp, to be used any way they saw fit, and Cade saw scene after scene of scattered groups of survivors being crushed under the heels of their demonic troops, of men, women, and children being tortured in as many different ways as there were faces of prisoners, of horror after horror being enacted on a global scale.
Cade cried out against the onslaught, appalled by what he was seeing, and then the visions were gone and he was left looking into the face of his lost love.
“If you do not strike, if you let your love for me stay your hand, he will use that very love against you,” Gabrielle said to him softly. “He will corrupt your heart and turn you into the very thing he has desired all along, a champion of darkness to rival all those who have come before. Out of your devotion to me you will remain by his side, trapped forever by his promise to one day set me free, and to reach that end you will do anything he asks. You will commit every kind of atrocity possible and still that will not be enough to sate his hunger; he was always require more.
“And so we will rule together over this blasted land, Queen and servant forever bound together by the one thing that should never have become corrupted in the first place.
“Our love for one another.”
Gabrielle reached out and caught hold of his other hand at the wrist, the blade of the Tear caught in the circle between them. Both of them were weeping openly now and the angels stood in a circle around them, bearing silent witness to the pain and sorrow that threatened to drown them forever, as if by viewing their pain they could somehow wash it away and make them whole once more.
But Cade knew the truth now.
He would never be whole ever again.
“You must do this, Cade,” Gabrielle told him softly.
He knew she was right; if he was honest, he had known deep in his heart that this was necessary ever since Uriel had first raised the issue, perhaps even as far back as the night of the Necromancer’s botched ritual.
“I know,” he answered, tears obscuring his vision. “But I’m not sure that I can...”
Through his tears he watched her bring his hands together so that they both rested on the hilt of the weapon, the blade pointed upward.
A shudder went through her and her grip tightening involuntarily, so tight that he felt some of the small bones in his hands snap beneath her grip and he clenched his teeth against the pain.
“Hurry, Cade,” she said, as another shudder wracked her frame. “We’re running out of time. He’s fighting against the binding and I can’t hold him back for much longer. Hurry!”
He nodded, but m
ade no move to do anything more.
How does one hurry to murder his own wife?
Gabrielle’s whole body suddenly spasmed involuntarily and it was clear the binding was about to fail. She caught his gaze and said simply, “Please, my love.”
With a soul-crushing cry of anguish Cade drove the dagger upward, under her rib cage and directly into her heart in a single, swift but deadly blow.
He felt her body stiffen.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered as a sob escaped him.
In that moment the magick of the Tear finally activated. There was a flash of power so strong that Cade was picked up off his feet and thrown backward by the force of it, passing between two of the angels standing in the circle behind him and slamming to the rooftop several yards away. Ignoring the pain, he forced himself to roll over and look back the way he had come, determined not to miss Gabrielle’s final moments.
When he looked up he saw Gabrielle’s hands wrapped around the hilt of the dagger buried deep in her chest and her body floating several inches off the roof, as if suspended there by an invisible rope. Her eyes met his one last time and then brilliant shafts of light burst from the middle of her body, one for each angel in the circle surrounding her, lashing out across the distance between them. As one, the angels opened their mouths and swallowed that power whole as it got close, drawing it down deep inside themselves like sucking water from a garden hose. Cade could hear the spit and crackle of the energy passing between them, could see the light growing brighter and brighter as more and more of that power was pulled from the depths of the Adversary’s being, and then there was a sudden, blinding flash accompanied by a clap of thunder that shook the building down to its foundations and made Cade turn his head away from the tableau before him.
When he looked back again, seconds later, the angels stood swaying unsteadily on their feet but Gabrielle was gone.
In the place where she had stood, only a darkened pile of ash remained.
The leader of the scream looked up into the night sky as if addressing someone only he could see and said, “It is over. Asharael is no more.”
Cade collapsed to the rooftop next to that pile of ash, his body wracked by sobs.
The angel was right; it was over. He had won the battle, but lost the war. Rather than save his wife he had become the instrument of her demise.
Riley found him there moments later, the Spear a few feet away.
Of the angels, there was no sign.
EPILOGUE
Two thousand miles away, in a room in a charity hospital in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a female patient who had been locked in a coma for more than two years suddenly bolted upright in her bed.
There was a nurse in the room at the time, recording the patient’s vitals on her chart, and the sudden movement so startled her that she fled from the room in fear, screaming about the dead coming back to life. It took several minutes for her colleagues to calm her down enough to understand what had happened.
When they finally got around to sending someone into the room to check on the patient, they found her standing by the window staring out into the night. Given the impossibility of that event, they immediately sent for her doctor, a man named Vargas, who arrived ten minutes later.
Dr. Vargas stopped in the doorway, eyeing her from where he stood, unwilling to get any closer.
The patient turned and addressed him in a voice as clear as a bell.
“I need to speak to my husband. It’s urgent.”
Vargas frowned. The patient’s name was Rodriguez. Anna Rodriguez, he knew. She was here in this hospital rather than the better one downtown because she was a ward of the state; she had no family and therefore no one to care for her. She was the victim of a motorcycle accident that had left her with a crushed skull and significant damage to the frontal lobe of her brain; she hadn’t been wearing a helmet when she’d been thrown from the seat of her bike and the resulting impact with the pavement had done the rest. No one had expected her to ever regain consciousness, least of all Vargas. It was only charity from a wealthy donor that had kept life support hooked up and running all this time; if Vargas had been in charge he would have disconnected the machines a long time ago.
But, thankfully it seemed, Vargas wasn’t in charge and the patient, rather than succumbing to an injury that should have killed her, had made a miraculous recovery.
Waking up would have been miracle enough, but Rodriguez apparently didn’t do things by half-measure. Not only had she woken up, but she had pulled out her feeding tube, gotten out of bed and crossed the room on her own, and was now talking to him as if nothing had ever happened to her.
It was enough to make the hair on the back of Vargas’ neck stand at attention.
But that was nothing compared to how he felt when she turned around and stepped toward him, allowing the light from the bedside lamp to fall across her features.
It wasn’t that she was beautiful; in fact, far from it.
What shocked Vargas to his core was the realization that Anna Rodriguez had awoken from her long sleep whole and unmarked.
The extensive scars along her skull that had been left in the wake of her emergency surgery were gone. So, too, were the steel rod and pins that had been implanted to allow the bone to go back in the proper location. Even the skin grafts that had been used to reconstruct the entire left side of her face – torn to ribbons when she’d slid along the uneven pavement for several dozen yards – had healed without a trace.
Even her eyes, which he remembered as a soft shade of brown, had undergone a transformation to green.
His patient caught his astonished gaze with a steady one of her own and repeated her demand.
“I need to speak to my husband. It’s a matter of life and death. He doesn’t understand what he’s done!”
Trembling, Vargas somehow found his voice.
“And your husband’s name?” he asked.
Rodriguez paused, as if searching her memory. After a long pause she turned to the doctor, a slight smile on her features.
“Cade. My husband’s name is Cade Williams.”
The story continues in FALL OF NIGHT
BEFORE LEAVING THE COMMANDERY
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Interested in more TEMPLAR books?
The Templar Chronicles Series
The Heretic (Book One)
A Scream of Angels (Book Two)
A Tear in the Sky (Book Three)
Infernal Games (Book Four)
Judgment Day (Book Five)
Fall of Night (Book Six)
Books one, two, and three are also available in a discount-priced bundle.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Nassise is the author of more than twenty novels, including the internationally bestselling TEMPLAR CHRONICLES series, the JEREMIAH HUNT trilogy, and the GREAT UNDEAD WAR series. He has also written several books in the popular Rogue Angel action-adventure series. He is a multiple Bram Stoker Award and International Horror Guild Award nominee and his work has been translated into half a dozen languages to date. He has written for both the comic and role-playing game industries and also served two terms as president of the Horror Writers Association, the world's largest organization of professional horror and dark fantasy writers.
JUDGMENT DAY
Copyright 2014 by Joseph Nassise
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) Page 22
