Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) (7 page)

Gabrielle was staring at the men gathered on the bridge in front of her, as if noticing them for the first time. As Cade looked on, a startling transformation swept over her face.

Her gaze lost its softness, growing hard and focused in a matter of seconds. The gentle smoothness of her features disappeared, replaced with harsh lines and angles as they took on a more predatory appearance. Even the color fled from her eyes, leaving nothing but silvery orbs. In seconds, the woman Cade knew was replaced by a total stranger who stared at him as if he were utterly beneath her contempt.

“Help me?” she said, in a voice that swept across the assembled knights like a cold Arctic wind. “What makes you think I need your help?”

Cade knew that voice. He’d first heard it in his own kitchen on a hot summer night when an inhuman killer had come to call and it had haunted his dreams every night since. It might be speaking through his wife’s lips but it did not belong to his wife.

It was the voice of the Adversary.

And in the next moment it attacked.

What Cade had taken to be a long leather coat was suddenly revealed to be a pair of enormous bat-like wings as they sprang open with the sound of a sail sharply unfurling in the wind and the Adversary launched itself into the air directly at the Templars!

Riley threw himself at Cade, knocking him to the ground ahead of him as the demon swept overhead, raking the air where their heads had been seconds before with fingers that morphed into claws even as it struck.

No, no, no!
Cade thought as he pushed himself up on his hands, his head swiveling to take in the scene behind him in the wake of the Adversary’s passing; knowing already what he would see but desperately wishing he was wrong.

He opened his mouth to shout, to order the men behind him to hold their fire, but his cry had barely begun before it was drowned out by the roar of more than a dozen submachine guns going off nearly simultaneously as the Templars opened fire.

Cade could only watch in horror as the Adversary seemed to dance and shake in mid-air as two squads of Templar knights hit it with concentrated firepower at the same time. The creature let loose a thunderous roar that literally shook the very framework of the bridge on which they stood as it was blown off course by the simultaneous impact of so many projectiles and disappeared over the side of the bridge.

The former Echo Team commander lurched to his feet and raced to the railing, screaming his wife’s name as he searched the water for any sign of her. Beside him, the Templar soldiers were doing the same, but for a very different reason.

It was too dark to see much and the sound of the water rushing past a hundred feet below covered any sounds their quarry might have been making. Shouts of “Anyone see it?” and “Where did it go?” passed between the men as they searched for it as earnestly as Cade.

Riley stepped up beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “You all right?” he asked.

Cade spun toward him. “You sonofabitch! You knew...”

That was as far as he got.

The Adversary exploded upward from the river below, moving so quickly that those lining the railing barely had time to focus before it was upon them. It had no weapon other than its claws, but they were all it needed as it lashed out at the closest individuals as it rushed past, laying the throats of two men open to the bone before it headed for the nearby trees in an attempt to put something between it and the Templars on the bridge.

Cade’s gaze followed the creature as it raced for safety and found himself mentally cheering it on, knowing it was the only way Gabrielle was going to survive.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Riley bring his weapon up, preparing to fire, and that was more than he could take.

Cade flung himself at his former comrade in arms, knocking the barrel of his weapon downward just as he went to open fire.

“What the hell are you doing?” Riley shouted over the din as he wrenched his weapon free of Cade’s grip and hurriedly tried to line up another shot.

Cade went nuts.

He knocked Riley’s gun aside a second time with one hand while punching him in the face with the other. The blow caught Riley completely by surprise and as his head rocked backwards, Cade swept Riley’s legs out from under him and rode him down to the ground where he began pummeling him with both hands in a fit of white-hot rage.

Riley was the bigger of the two men, but the intensity of Cade’s attack had caught him by surprise and Cade had the upper hand as he kept Riley pinned to the ground. It might have gone on that way for several minutes if some of the other Templars hadn’t seen Riley’s plight and rushed to his aide. Three men tried to drag Cade off of the Echo Team commander, but all they managed to do was earn several blows of their own as Cade successfully fought them off.

Those few moments of respite were all Riley needed, however.

When Cade raised his fists, ready to deliver another series of punishing blows, Riley jabbed him in the side with the Taser he’d managed to pull off his belt.

Cade’s eyes widened as he realized what was about to happen.

Sorry, boss,
Riley thought, as he pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER SEVEN

He stood in the midst of a great wood, the massive trees looming around him like ancient sentinels glaring down at an unwelcome intruder. All he could see in every direction were trees, which was disconcerting, for he had no idea where he was or what he was doing there.

Nor did he know how to get out.

The dense foliage and thick branches high above his head kept most of the light out and what filtered down through cast long, lazy shadows between the trees, shadows that seemed to twist and sway of their own accord when he looked in their direction.

A distant voice called his name and he recognized it immediately as that of his wife, Gabrielle. He turned in a slow circle, trying to get a sense of where the call had come from, suddenly knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was in danger and that he had to get to her as quickly as possible; but the sound of her cry bounced off the tree trunks and made it difficult for him to get a fix on her position.

“Gabrielle?”

Again he heard her cry out. ”Here, Cade! I’m here!”

He moved in one direction and then, second-guessing his decision, turned back and moved in the other.

“Keep talking, Gabrielle! Help me find you!”

For a moment he didn’t hear anything and then…

“Hurry, Cade!” she cried, and then something else.

Her voice seemed to be fading, as if she were moving away from him, and he wasn’t certain that he heard her correctly. It had sounded like she’d said, “Open your eyes and see!”

Open his eyes?
he thought, frustrated.
What on earth was she talking about? His eyes were open!

“Gabrielle!”

This time she didn’t answer.

He shouted again, several times, to no avail.

Cade started to panic. He hurried through the trees in one direction, then turned and moved in another, shouting her name all the while. When he at last stopped to catch his breath, he no longer had any idea what direction to move in.

He was missing something; he knew it.

Open his eyes?

Then, like a bolt of lightning out of a clear summer sky, it came to him.

She hadn’t said open his eyes, but rather open his EYE, as in his third eye, his Sight. Open his Eye and see!

Cade did as he was told. He lifted the eye patch off his damaged right eye, revealing the scarred socket and milky-white eye hidden beneath, a gift from the Adversary in their very first encounter. He stared outward into the trees surrounding him, and, fixing his wife firmly in his thoughts, triggered his Sight.

The first time Cade had faced the Adversary, he’d very nearly been killed and had come away scarred to the core, body and soul. It was only later, while recovering in the hospital, that he’d discovered that the encounter had left him with a some rather unique abilities. His Sight was one of them.

Like shining a light into a darkened room, it allowed him to see reality as it truly was, stripping away the glamours and disguises that the supernatural world typically cloaked itself in and revealing the faces behind the masks. It also let him peer behind the mystical veil that separated the world of the living from the purgatory-like realm he called the Beyond.

Cade didn’t understand how it was going to help him now, but that didn’t matter. Gabrielle had saved him too many times in the past for him not to trust her. She’d been able to communicate with him when her soul had been lost in the Beyond and he expected she could do the same now, despite the fact that the Adversary had laid claim to her physical form.

The moment he made the mental connection that triggered his ability, a lance of light shot forward from the spot on which he stood, piercing the darkness between the tree trunks about fifteen degrees away from the path he’d been following. It hung there in the air a moment, illuminating the way before him, and then faded slowly from view until nothing remained but the afterglow in the corner of his eyes.

Cade had no doubt that if he followed that path, he would find Gabrielle.

He released his Sight, replaced his eyepatch, and then moved out.

A thick fog covered the ground and rose to about mid-calf, making it difficult for Cade to see where to put his feet. Several times he tripped and fell, only to stagger to his feet and continue on his way, and it wasn’t long before his hands and knees were scraped bloody and raw from catching himself on unseen debris.

After what felt like forever, the trees gave way to a wide clearing a good fifty yards across. On the far side rose an enormous oak, larger even than the trees surrounding it, and twice as wide. Great swaths of thorny vines surrounded its base and stretched upward in creeping strands against its trunk. As his gaze followed them, he was shocked to discover his wife pinned against the trunk and held captive high above the ground, her hands and feet secured to the tree with twisting strands of those same cruel thorns.

Cade gasped in surprised horror and, despite the distance between them, Gabrielle opened her eyes at the sound.

She recognized him immediately. ”Help me, Cade,” she said and he heard her as clearly as if she was standing next to him, speaking into his ear. Without thought, without hesitation, he charged across the clearing toward her, determined to find a way to get her down.

The first twenty yards passed without incident.

But as he neared the center of the clearing, his foot caught on something – a rock? a root thrust upward through the soil? – and he stumbled, staggering forward several feet before losing his balance entirely and falling to his knees.

Feeling like an idiot, he tried to get up, only to discover that he could not. His foot was stuck fast, apparently by whatever he’d stumbled over.

“Hurry, Cade,” Gabrielle called.

“I’m coming,” he said, a little impatiently, as he kicked his leg to free it while glancing back to see what he’d caught himself on.

His thrashing parted the fog a moment, allowing him to see.

At first he thought he thought he’d gotten his foot tangled up in a mass of roots, but then they moved and he realized what he’d taken for roots were actually long, narrow fingers that had burst from the soil and wrapped themselves around his ankle. Even as he looked on he could feel them squeezing tighter…

Heart racing, Cade tried to raise his other leg to kick himself loose, only to discover that it, too, had been snared. The fingers were squeezing so tightly that they had sunk into his flesh and he could feel blood running down his leg as they fought for more purchase.

“Let go!” Cade shouted in frustration, kicking his legs to no avail. He tried clawing his way forward, digging his fingers into the earth and pulling with all the might of his upper body and still getting nowhere.

That’s when the ground beneath him started to give way and the hands began to drag him under.

Cade fought like a cornered rat, throwing himself about and scrambling to hold on to whatever was within reach in an effort to tear himself away from the hands holding him, but nothing helped.

Slowly but surely his legs were dragged beneath the surface, until he was buried from the waist down. His legs were going numb from the tightness of the grip on his calves, but he refused to give up.

Gabrielle was screaming his name at this point and yet he didn’t dare take the chance of looking in her direction for fear the distraction would cause him to lose even more ground.

He slipped deeper, nearly up to his armpits, and he could feel dozens more hands grasping at his torso and upper thighs, nails digging into his flesh as they pulled him deeper.

He was still flailing in vain when the hands dragged him under…

Cade lurched awake, the dream receding into the depths of his consciousness like a snake slipping into the night’s shadows.

For a moment he didn’t know where he was or why he was there. Then he realized that he’d been dreaming and the memories of what had really happened came rushing back; images flashing on the Imax screen of his mind with all the grace of an avalanche as he relived seeing his former allies gunning down the woman he loved in an effort to kill the creature that held her captive. He’d lost control at that point, charging forward like some kind of crazed lunatic and attacked anyone he could get his hands on until someone had clubbed him unconscious from behind.

Now, with his eyes open, he found himself in the back of one of the Order’s transport vans as it headed heaven knew where. Twin benches lined either side of the cargo area and he was secured to one of them with handcuffs and belly chains. A glance told him the restraints hadn’t been put on well, for he had at least six inches of slack that he could use to cause trouble if he was so inclined. Sitting across from him on the other bench was a Templar soldier, MP5 in hand. The name tag on his ballistic vest read Dalton.