Jack Templar and the Lord of the Werewolves (Book #4 of the Templar Chronicles)

by Jeff Gunhus

  “At first, I couldn’t control much of this. All my senses were bombarded the second I opened myself up to the world. It was like trying to take a drink of water from a giant fire hose. So I had to close down just to survive it. Aquinas taught me how to do that. Mind tricks, control exercises, meditation. It worked well enough for me to overhear that Xavier was going to meet you guys and to realize I needed to escape and rejoin the fight.”

  We’d walked through the square by this time and down one of the main cobblestoned streets. Old storefronts lined each side. I stopped and waited until she turned to look at me.

  “Last question,” I said. “Can you forgive me?”

  There it was, the question I both didn’t want to ask and absolutely had to ask. She didn’t shy away from it but looked me right in the eye.

  “I hated you for what you allowed Shakra to do to me. No, what you asked her to do to me. You turned me into the thing I’d spent my entire life trying to destroy. You put Ren Lucre’s blood into mine.”

  “But you were –“

  “Let me finish,” she said. “And then we won’t talk about this again.” She drew in a deep breath. “I drifted into a dark place. So dark that I didn’t think I wanted to go on. But Aquinas brought me back. She helped me understand why you did it.”

  “Do you forgive me?”

  “No,” she stated plainly. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to that. But I don’t hate you for it either. And that’s going to have to be enough for now.”

  I nodded. Not exactly the words you want to hear from the girl of your dreams, but it would have to do.

  “Those are your five questions,” she said. “Happy now?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “That makes two of us. But maybe now we can do our jobs a little better. We have a world to save.” She pointed to a tavern in front of us, a dingy place with bad lighting and tilted walls. It looked like the place could collapse at any minute. A sign with a wolf walking upright as a man hung over the door, with the words Heulender Wolf beneath it. .

  “That’s German for the Howling Wolf,” Eva said. “And this is our best and only chance to find Kaeden, so don’t mess it up.”

  She strode toward the tavern without me. As I watched her go, I wondered why I liked her so much. I ran to catch up, curious about what I might find inside, completely unprepared for what would happen to me.

  Chapter 17

  Based on the way the outside of the tavern seemed to be falling apart, I assumed the inside would be a mess. And I was right. Bare, dirty light bulbs hung from the ceiling in odd intervals, swinging slightly as the building moved with each step a patron took. A smoky fire burned in the hearth in the corner, casting weird shadows through the room. The plastered ceiling was low enough in places to touch with an outstretched hand. I noticed stains there, and at first, I thought it was from roof leaks above. On a closer look, the splatter marks were clearly from drinks thrown into the air. It wasn’t hard to imagine a rowdy group of German fieldworkers getting carried away, clinking steins together as they sang the old songs.

  A man stood behind an enormous dark wood bar, doing what barkeeps around the world do in their down time, rubbing spots off a glass with a dishtowel. He was thick-chested and bald, the top of his head as shiny as the polished wood of his bar. His eyes seemed too small for his face, an impression added to because he squinted like someone who’d lost his glasses. He wore pants and a long sleeve shirt mostly covered by a black leather apron like one an ironsmith would use. Although he avoided eye contact, he cast furtive glances at us from the first second we walked into the door until we reached the edge of his bar.

  “We’re closed,” he said in a heavy German accent.

  I looked around at the handful of other people in the place. Only five or six of them, but they were hunched over drinks, some eating plates of food. A waitress with dark red hair and fair skin came through the swinging doors from the kitchen, carrying platters of sausages and roasted vegetables. My mouth watered from the smell, and my stomach tightened to remind me I’d been neglecting it. The waitress, who I have to admit was very attractive, walked right past us and gave me a wink. I felt my face turn hot from embarrassment.

  “You don’t look closed,” I managed.

  “Really?” the man said, looking around. “You know what, you’re right. Is this better?”

  Just then, the waitress slammed the front door shut and lowered an iron bar across it. The other patrons jumped to their feet, knocking back chairs and tipping tables in their rush. Weapons didn’t even need to be pulled, they’d been hidden under the tables.

  In only seconds, a circle of swords pointed at us.

  Even so, I pulled my sword and stood in front of Eva. I searched their faces and couldn’t spot any signs of Creach among them. As far as I could tell, they were men.

  Monster hunters.

  They must have realized Eva was a vampire. They were doing what any good band of hunters would do – attack the Creach that had wandered into their lair.

  “Put down your weapons,” I yelled. “We’re members of the Black Guard.”

  The waitress with the red hair stepped toward us. The circle of men parted for her to pass and then closed back behind her. I didn’t know how I could have missed it before, but an air of command surrounded her. It was clear without a single word uttered or command given who was in charge here.

  “I am Skyal,” the woman said. “And how can a vampire-wretch like this be of the Guard?”

  “She is,” I said. “She’s one of us. I swear it.”

  The men around us laughed. Even Skyal broke a quick smile, but it disappeared quickly. She was all business.

  “Can you prove it?” Skyal said.

  “The truthsayer, Jack,” Eva whispered.

  I nodded. “There’s a truthsayer in my front coat pocket. You can use it.”

  Skyal glanced at Eva, then back at me. “All right, throw it to me.”

  I did as she asked, moving carefully in case any of them used my change in position as an invitation to attack. After taking out the metal cylinder, I tossed it to Skyal.

  She caught it easily and rolled it over in her hands. “I’ve always wanted to see one of these.”

  “So you know how it works,” I said. “You have to be careful to ask the right question.”

  “I know that,” she snapped. “Do you take me for a fool?”

  “No, of course not,” I said, nervous that she suddenly seemed a little unsteady. “Just trying to be helpful.”

  “You can be helpful by answering this; are you a member of the Black Guard?”

  “Yes,” I said. Eva remained silent, glowering at the woman.

  Skyal looked at the truthsayer, and I knew the tiny lines would be moving into the shape FACTUM, the Latin word for true.

  “Good,” she said, looking up from the cylinder. “Did you and the vampire here come to us with a secret plan to destroy us?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “I didn’t even know you were in here.”

  Skyal watched the answer form in the truthsayer and looked mildly surprised. “All right, last question. It’s an important one. What’s your name, boy?”

  I hesitated, realizing that the woman didn’t seem to care about Eva at all.

  “I said, what’s your name?” the woman hissed.

  “Jack,” I replied.

  “Last name?”

  “Templar,” I said. “My name is Jack Templar.”

  The woman looked down at the cylinder and then smiled triumphantly. “Very good,” she said, pocketing the truthsayer. “Thank you.”

  Even with Skyal’s acknowledgement that I was telling the truth, none of the armed men surrounding us moved from their fighting stances.

  “You have to believe me about my friend,” I said to the group gathered around us. “She’s one of us.”

  Skyal laughed, and the men around her followed suit. But it was an ugly sound full of hate
and mockery.

  “Poor fool,” Skyal said. “You really have no idea, do you? I don’t think I even needed the truthsayer to know that.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded.

  “You’re only half-right. Your vampire friend here is one of us.” Skyal’s eyes glowed red, and sharp horns grew from her temples, pushing through her red hair. “Only we’re not one of you.”

  As my mind worked through the implications, I felt a bolt of pain on the wrist holding my sword. I dropped it, and it fell to the floor where one of the men picked it up.

  On reflex, my other hand reached for the dagger on my side, only there was a hand on my wrist before I reached it. The grip was strong, holding me like solid rock.

  I looked up slowly, already knowing what I’d see but not wanting to believe it.

  Eva.

  She had me by the wrist.

  She was one of them.

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” she whispered. “But I told you I didn’t forgive you.”

  I saw a flash of movement as her other hand smashed into the side of my head. And everything went black.

  Chapter 18

  I didn’t dream the first time. At least I don’t remember dreaming at all. But I did wake up with a jerk, my heart pounding and adrenaline pumping through me. I thought I was coming out of a terrible nightmare. Turned out, I was waking up into one.

  Thick ropes wrapped around me, binding my hands to my sides and my legs together in a bizarre cocoon. As if that wasn’t enough, I lay in an iron cage being pulled along in a horse-drawn wagon. Trees streamed past me like a river. I had the uncomfortable sense that the world had lost its gravity, and things had simply spun out in every direction. The disorientation worsened when a face entered my field of vision from behind me, upside down and to one side. It was Skyal.

  “Well now, you’re not supposed to be awake, are you?” she said. Then she bared her teeth in a snarl. “Go back to sleep until we get there.”

  Another burst of white, hot pain to the side of my head.

  Then everything went black again.

  Chapter 19

  This time I dreamed.

  I was flying over the forest, far above the height of even the tallest trees. I had the strongest sense of déjà vu and searched my memory for all the times I’d flown before.

  There was a plane ride with my Aunt Sophie the year we went down to Disney World. The memory brought a smile to my face. Not just because any thought of my Aunt Sophie was a fond one, but because I knew now that as I’d ridden on the rides, watched parades, and soaked up all that Disney magic, I’d been right next to a devil-werewolf the entire time.

  There was my airborne fight with the harpies when a group of them attacked us in the forests near my house in Sunnyvale. The view above those trees looked similar to what I saw beneath me, but I’d been holding on for dear life and then fighting and clawing my way loose after that. It was nothing like the smooth, floating feeling I had now.

  The next time I flew was on the back of an outraged dragon flying over the Monster Hunter Academy and the surrounding mountains. That had been a wild, looping ride as the beast tried every trick in the book to shake me off its back and hurl me to my death. That experience had some of the power of the sense of flight I was experiencing, but still wasn’t what I was looking for in my memory.

  Then it came to me.

  It was months before the ride on the dragon. I’d forgotten because it wasn’t real. At least not in the physical sense.

  The last time I felt like this was the night I’d drowned in the river escaping Ren Lucre.

  The night I’d died.

  The second I realized, I tumbled from the sky. I cried out, flapping my arms and kicking with my legs. The forest canopy rushed up at me, and I crashed through it.

  Branches tore at my clothes, but they also slowed my fall. By the time I reached the lowest branches, I was half-falling, half-lowering myself to the ground. A few seconds later, I was standing on the forest floor on a soft bed of moss covered with dried pine nettles.

  I took stock of my surroundings and reached for my sword only to find it gone. I was still wearing the clothes I’d been captured in.

  Captured.

  By Eva.

  The memory of the tavern flooded over me along with feelings of betrayal and pain. Until that moment, the memory had the decency to stay on the sidelines, lingering right on the edge of my consciousness as if it knew it was too painful for me to handle.

  How could Eva have done that?

  But she hadn’t done it, I told myself. The vampire blood in her had made her do it.

  The words she’d used argued otherwise. I told you I didn’t forgive you. Those were the words of someone enjoying revenge over an enemy. She’d said them with such bitter triumph that there was no way to explain it away.

  Eva was with the Creach now.

  A rustle of air through feathers whooshed right behind me. On reflex, I ducked rolled to my right, coming up in a crouched, fighting position. A white owl flew past me, easily navigating through the pine trees. It perched on a branch some distance from me and rotated its head until it stared at me with its oversized, black eyes.

  “Hoo?” said the owl, making it sound like a question.

  “Mom? Is that you?” I asked. I felt foolish asking, but the last time this had happened to me my mother had appeared. Still, she hadn’t taken the form of an animal. She had just been herself.

  The owl opened its wings and flew deeper into the forest. I ran after it, nearly losing it once or twice as it darted between the trees. The bright white stood out so starkly amid the greens and browns of the forest that sometimes all I saw was a flash of its color between the trees for only a split second. At first, I assumed the owl was leading me somewhere. But as it flew farther ahead of me, I considered that it was just trying to get away from me.

  Just when I thought about stopping the chase, the forest opened into a perfectly circular meadow of tall grass. A slight breeze blew, and the grass swayed in a soothing, hypnotic rhythm. In the center of the meadow stood the five pillars from the ruins at Delphi, the Temple of the Oracle.

  The owl circled once around the meadow, then flew over the pillars and flapped its wings in a controlled, slow descent into the center. I lost sight of the bird because the grass was too high, so I crept closer to the pillars. Slowly, the little girl I’d met at the ruins came into view, the form in which Pythia, the Oracle, had originally appeared to me. She smiled and walked to the edge of the circle formed by the ruined pillars but was careful not to cross over.

  “You,” I said stupidly.

  The Oracle smiled. “You have a way with words, Jack. So eloquent.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked but then realized I knew a better question. “What am I doing here? Did I… did I die?”

  The Oracle laughed. It was an adult sound, disturbing coming from the little girl’s body. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Die and then come back like last time? Have that count as a fulfillment of the prophecy I gave you.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” I said even though it really hadn’t. I didn’t want to let on that my mind was still whirling and having trouble catching up to this weird situation. The Oracle had proven to be dangerous. I needed to be sharp, so I didn’t find myself in a battle with another one of her creatures because I said the wrong thing.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re not dead,” the Oracle said.

  “But the last time, it looked just like this. Felt like this,” I replied, reminding myself that there was no reason for me to trust anything the Oracle told me. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

  The little girl frowned. “Do you find insults an effective way to get people to help you?”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” I asked. “Helping me?”

  The Oracle shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe this is just a dream from that knock on the head your girlfriend gave y
ou.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” I said, feeling slightly ridiculous saying it.

  “Whatever you say.”

  “I think this is real,” I said. “I mean, not really real, but I don’t think I’m making you up.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because you’re staying inside the pillars. I don’t think I would imagine you locked up like that. Somehow it’s tied to you being able to communicate with me,” I said.

  “Aren’t you a clever boy?” the Oracle said.

  “So, you’re here, but why?” I asked, more to myself than to her. “Do you want me to succeed?”

  The Oracle shrugged. “I’m neutral on the subject. I can’t stand the race of Man. Rude, obnoxious, greedy, a terrible waste of organic material.”

  “But you don’t like Ren Lucre either,” I guessed.

  The Oracle scowled. “He wants to destroy mankind, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, but he also wants to rule over us all. I can’t decide which is more distasteful.”

  “Then we’re back where we started,” I said. “Why are you here?”

  “I explained a little how prophecy works when I saw you last. Do you remember?”

  “I mostly remember your statue trying to eat me.”

  The Oracle waved the comment away like a fly buzzing around her head. “Prophecy is not seeing the future, it’s seeing all futures simultaneously and then trying to understand which outcome out of an infinite universe of outcomes is most likely.”

  “Like in a sword fight,” I offered. “You have a hundred different moves to make and your opponent has a hundred different possible reactions, but you have to think them all through in a blink of an eye.”

  “I suppose so,” the Oracle said. “Now suppose there are a thousand versions of you fighting a thousand opponents, and you get closer to what I see.”

  “Doesn’t it overwhelm you?” I asked.

  “That’s why I remain inside these pillars. Even if they are erected only in my own mind, they protect me from being buried under it all.”

  I was starting to grow impatient. In the real world outside of this dream state, I was in trouble. Bound and captured by the Creach, being taken who knew where. Betrayed by Eva. Lost to my friends. As interesting as this little lesson on prophecy was, I didn’t see how it was going to help me.