Noting its position, Cade cancelled his Sight and found himself back in the everyday world. Keeping his gaze on the locker so he wouldn’t lose track of which one it was, he walked over and opened it up.
Taped to the back of the locker was an envelope with his name written on it in a spidery hand.
Cade propped the staff up inside the locker, pulled the envelope free and then tore it open. Inside was a note.
Leave the staff inside the locker and secure it behind you, it read. Wait for new instructions.
Cade did so.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Riley paced back and forth in the narrow confines of his office, trying to keep his cool. He was absolutely furious and had to resist the urge to smash his desk chair against the wall or he’d have nothing to sit on. That arrogant fool of a Preceptor was about to start a war with the wrong individual; Cade would eat him alive and then come back for seconds. And they’d still be no closer to finding the Necromancer than they currently were. It was insane! Riley knew he had to do everything in his power to extricate the Order from the situation before things totally went to hell.
He had to find Cade before anyone else did.
But how?
Work the evidence, his gut said. It was there, somewhere, the piece of the puzzle he needed to blow this thing wide open and he just wasn’t seeing it. Put the case together piece by piece and he was certain to see what he had overlooked.
He’d gotten more information out the Preceptor before he’d stalked out. Apparently Cade had lured Fourth Squad’s commander, Sergeant Lyons, off the grounds to a meeting in a local restaurant where he had somehow convinced Lyons to take him back to the commandery and get him through security at the gate without anyone recognizing him. That suggested he was wearing a disguise of some kind, which in turn explained the outfit Cade had been wearing in the surveillance video. Cade was a hiking boots, blue jeans, and t-shirt kind of guy but the outfit he had on looked more like a clerk or custodian’s uniform.
Lyons was injected with a combination of drugs Riley recognized as being standard issue for interrogation purposes and was left to sleep it off in an empty office down the hall from the reliquary. Aside from the injury to his pride, Lyons was unharmed. Hopefully he could confirm some of their assumptions when he woke up from his chemically-induced nap.
After bypassing security, Cade overpowered the two men working inside the reliquary and stole a single item, the Staff of Anubis. He then returned to ground level of the commandery and pulled the nearest fire alarm, slipping outside with the crowd without being recognized.
It was a simple yet elegant plan and it was executed with precision.
Typical Cade, in other words.
It seemed clear to Riley that Cade was intentionally trying to keep from injuring those he encountered. Cade had warned Riley off. Lyons had been drugged. The guards in the reliquary had been knocked unconscious. With the exception of Brother Samuel at the French monastery – and Riley was convinced the seriousness of that injury had been entirely accidental – no one had come to any serious harm.
It was a marked contrast to the trail of bodies the Necromancer generally left in his wake and Riley for one was glad that it was Cade who was collecting the artifacts and not Logan.
That line of thought brought Riley to the relics themselves. The hand of a Christian saint and a staff that legend said was connected to the Egyptian deity Anubis. At first glance they didn’t seem to have anything in common, but upon closer examination into the background of each item it was clear that both had been used not only to interact with the dead but also to bring the dead back to life.
Logan’s power was already considerable. Riley had seen first-hand the kind of forces that Logan could raise to do his bidding, from revenants to corpse hounds to demons from the very planes of Hell itself. He could call the dead to get up and walk again any time he liked. What good would the Hand or Staff do him?
That was the question of the hour in Riley’s mind.
Logan had gone after the items almost immediately after escaping from Templar custody. That showed he’d been thinking about the process for some time and that it wasn’t pure happenstance. He not only wanted them, but he needed them for something.
But what?
Perhaps they’re a focus, Riley thought. A way of taking the Necromancer’s powers and boosting them beyond his current abilities. Like an amplifier of some kind.
The idea was a reasonable one and Riley decided to run with it, to see where it took him.
Okay, he thought. If the relics are intended to boost his abilities, to give him more power, then what does he need that power for?
Or perhaps more specifically, what was he trying to raise that required that much power?
The answer, when it came to him, sent a chill up his spine.
The new instructions reached Cade before he was even out of the parking lot and he realized that he’d never be able to hear the particular chime of his phone again without being overcome with near-murderous rage.
He dug the phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen.
One more item and your precious Gabrielle can go free. Bring me the feather of an arch-angel. I believe you already have one in your possession, no?
Cade stared at the message and suddenly understood, beyond the shadow of a doubt, just what it was that the Necromancer intended to do. He suspected it when the first request came to him, and that suspicion grew into belief after retrieving the Staff, and now there seemed to be little doubt that he was correct.
The message also told him something else.
Logan wanted him to know what he was up to.
It was right there, in between the lines of his latest message, a gauntlet thrown down to see if Cade was up to the challenge, daring him to try to stop what was about to transpire.
Cade felt his blood start to boil at the thought.
There was no way he could walk away now.
The two of them had been on a collision course since the day this had all begun many years before, two moons orbiting a dark star on intersecting trajectories that would one day eventually bring them slamming into each other at incredible speed.
That day, it seemed, had come.
The stakes had just been raised, and this time, Cade knew that there could only be one outcome.
He would stop the Necromancer or die trying.
It was that simple.
Cade drove out of the bus station and worked his way through the side streets until he reached the highway. Once there he gunned the engine, sending the SUV racing north toward the confrontation to come.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Ever since the day he returned from the Isle of Sorrows, Cade had kept the feather he believed came from the wings of the fallen angel, Ashareal, in the safe inside his workshop. The feather had served its purpose; it led him across the Sea of Lamentations and to his confrontation with the Adversary, the thing Ashareal had become after centuries of corruption. With the help of Riley and Sergeant Sean Duncan, Cade had been able to destroy the Adversary’s physical form and send it back to whatever plane of Hell it had managed to crawl out of in the first place.
Now it seemed that the feather was needed once more.
It took Cade almost two hours to make the drive from Newport to Willow Grove, during which he had plenty of time to plan out his next move. He assumed his house was being watched; he knew he would have put it under surveillance if he had been in Riley’s shoes, so he couldn’t just pull into the driveway and park.
Cade had gotten into the habit of walking in the woods behind his home while Gabrielle napped in the afternoons and during one of those walks he discovered a trail that led him to the shore of a small pond on public conservation land about a quarter-mile away from his home. Rather than heading for home, he made his way to that property instead, parking along the street nearby when he found the road leading to the pond blocked by a narrow chain to prevent the local teenagers from us
ing the place as a make-out spot after dark.
He set off on foot and by the time he managed to navigate his way through the trees the sun had sunk below the horizon and it had grown full dark. He stopped at the edge of the tree line at the rear of his property and watched the house and workshop for a time.
The lights were off; no one seemed to be there.
Cade knew they were there, though. He could feel their presence, an invasion in the otherwise familiar vibe of his home.
Under the cover of darkness, he stepped out of the trees made his way directly over to the rear wall of his workshop. He knew this place intimately, had built every square inch of it with his own hands, so it didn’t take any effort at all for him to locate the back door, unlock it with his keys, and slip inside.
Cade went straight to the old-fashioned cast iron floor safe under his workbench. Using the illumination from his phone as a miniature light, he spun the combination dial and opened the lock. He took out the case in which he stored the feather, checked to be certain it was still inside, and then slipped the case into the inside pocket of his jacket.
He closed the safe door, spun the dial to lock it, and moved back across the room to the door. He was halfway across the backyard when he heard a racing engine and watched as headlights splashed across the tree trunks between him and the driveway.
Someone’s in a big hurry.
Cade’s curiosity got the better of him. As he slipped back into the cover of the trees, he moved through them in a wide arc until he found a spot from which he could watch the front of the house.
He was just in time.
No sooner had he settled into place than a dark-colored Suburban came up the drive, its headlight illuminating a similar vehicle parked in front of it. As he watched, the driver’s door was thrown open and Riley hopped out and headed for Cade’s front door.
He didn’t make it halfway up the walk before the door opened and another Templar Cade didn’t recognize stepped out to greet him.
Gotcha! he thought. He’d been right; there were watchers in the house.
To his surprise, Riley didn’t go in the house but called to the other man to join him and both of them walked around the side of the house, most likely headed for the workshop in back.
Cade glanced at the SUV Riley had arrived in and back again at the house. He’d been out here in the cold and dark long enough, he decided.
A mischievous smile spread across his face as he headed for the SUV.
Riley entered the workshop, flipped on the lights, and headed for the library of books that lined one entire wall of the structure. Cade had one of the best occult libraries outside of the Vatican, a result of his unrelenting search for the Adversary. Somewhere in one of these books he was certain he would find a ritual that utilized the items that Cade had been collecting for the last several days. He had four people from the tech division on the way with a van full of scanning equipment and he intended to scan every page and let the computer search through all the data to find what he wanted. It might take a while to find it, but when he did Riley was certain that it would give him some new insight into where the Necromancer might be hiding and how, exactly, he intended to pull off what Riley suspected he was trying to do.
Before he could get started, however, he heard an engine revving out front and then the sound of squealing tires. He and Thompson, one of the two men he’d assigned to watch the property for Cade’s return, looked at each other and then ran for the door, drawing their weapons as they went.
They raced around the side of the house just in time to see Riley’s black Suburban race off down the road. For an instant Riley thought he’d glimpsed Cade at the wheel, but then the vehicle was past and rapidly accelerating down the road away from them.
Thompson got off a single shot, which actually managed to smash the rear window of the vehicle. After that there were too many trees between them and the vehicle for shooting to do any good.
“Come on!” Riley shouted and ran for the vehicle that had brought Thompson and his partner, Lidell, here for their shift.
“Keys, keys!” Riley shouted, snapping his fingers at the other man to punctuate his request as they ran. Liddel flipped them over to him underhanded just as they reached the vehicle.
Snatching them out of the air, Riley reached for the driver’s door…and skidded to a halt.
His gaze flicked from the front tire to the rear and back again.
From the other side, he heard Thompson say, “Uh…Captain?”
Riley didn’t need to hear what the other man was going to say.
The two tires on his side of the vehicle were flat. He knew without looking that the two on the other side were as well.
Cade outsmarted him again.
Once Cade was certain that Riley hadn’t managed to muster up some pursuit, he pulled over to the side of the road and popped the hood. Using the flashlight app on his cell phone, he hunted around until he found the GPS transmitter that was installed on every Templar vehicle. He followed the wire that led back to the truck’s battery and disconnected it, cutting off power to the device.
Back at the commandery, a red light winked out on a technician’s monitor.
Satisfied he could cover his tracks for the next few hours while he prepared for his confrontation with the Necromancer, Cade got back in the truck and restarted the engine. Rather than pulling back onto the road, however, he took out his cell phone and dialed the number he’d been given to make contact once he had the feather in his possession.
Logan answered on the eighth ring.
Cade didn’t say anything for a moment, just listened to the open line. In the background, he thought he heard a long whistle. A train, maybe? A boat? He wasn’t sure.
“All right, Logan, let’s get this over with,” he said.
“You have the feather?”
Cade didn’t say anything. Let the fool figure it out himself.
After a moment the Necromancer said, “I see you are tiring of our little game. Don’t worry, Commander, it will all be over soon.”
“Cut the bullshit, Logan, and tell me where to bring this to you.”
“A locker has been arranged…”
Cade cut him off. “Not a fucking chance, asshole. If you want the feather, you can damn well take it from my hand. You get the feather, I get my wife. That was the deal.”
Silence fell. Cade knew the Necromancer was still on the other end for he could hear the man’s labored breathing.
Finally, “All right, Commander. We will do it your way. Warehouse 486 in the Red Hook Container Terminal. 8 pm.”
The Necromancer laughed and then the line went dead.
I’m coming for you, you bastard, Cade thought. You’d best be ready because I’m coming and it ends tonight.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Necromancer hit the end call button and then tossed the phone aside. He wasn’t going to need it any longer; it had served its purpose. Williams was on his way.
He crossed the room to where two of his acolytes were waiting. It hadn’t taken them long to find him after his escape from the Templar holding facility.
Like called to like, apparently.
These two were the most talented out of those who had made their way to his current sanctuary. He explained what he wanted done and waited to be certain that they understood. When he was confident that they did, he sent them out to the water’s edge to carry out his request. If they proved useful when the Knight Commander made his inevitable appearance, he would consider bringing them with him when he moved on from here. He needed to begin reassembling his Circle and these two might just prove to be satisfactory candidates. He would wait and watch and decide their fate later.
Logan looked out across the room, watched as three more of his acolytes secured the woman’s body to a metal frame much like the one he’d used during the ritual in Bridgeport. An iron ring went around her forehead, holding her head upright to the upper most point of the pentacle that her bo
dy was forming; her arms and legs were extended to either side to form the other four points. By making the vessel itself a living, breathing part of the symbol at the very core of the ritual, he hoped to make the passage across the Veil easier for the target of his summons.
To be helped along, of course, by the sacrifice of her lover and husband.
It was perfection itself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Red Hook Container Terminal was a maritime facility located in Brooklyn that serviced container ships and handled bulk cargo destined for New York, New jersey and points north into New England. It had six active container cranes operating along more than two thousand feet of berth, with two major bulk-handling yards and almost 500,000 square feet of warehouse space. If the Necromancer hadn’t specified which warehouse to meet in, it would have taken Cade an entire week to search them all.
There was no one at the gate when Cade arrived just before 8 pm that evening. He wasn’t surprised; he suspected that there were very few living things left inside the terminal at that point, if the Necromancer had claimed it for his own. Cade got out of the truck, pushed the crossing barrier up out of the way, and then drove into the facility, fully prepared to get Gabrielle back or die in the attempt.
Not wanting to advertise his presence by driving up to the door of the warehouse, Cade took out his cell phone and used the Terminal’s interactive mobile site to locate the correct warehouse. Then he parked the truck in the shadows of another building and got out.
His armor and weapons were in the back seat, so he spent several minutes suiting up. The ceramic body armor went on first, over which he pulled a military-style jumpsuit made from black, flame-retardant material. He strapped his pistol to his leg in a quick draw holster and added four extra magazines to the equipment belt he slung around his waist. A combat knife was secured to the underside of his left wrist and his sword case went over his back in its usual place. Last, but not least, he picked up his HK MP5/10 submachine gun. With its trademark double magazine he had sixty rounds of available ammunition before he had to reload the weapon and he stashed an extra magazine for that in his belt as well.
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