Infernal Games (Templar Chronicles Urban Fantasy Series) (5 page)

I
t
was just after eight o’clock that evening when the phone rang. Cade was in his
workshop, fighting his way through a new tome he had acquired just that week,
searching, as he did most nights, for some clue as to how he might return
Gabrielle to her former self. So far he hadn’t had any luck, but that didn’t
mean the answer wasn’t out there, perhaps on the very next page...

Cade
didn’t receive many calls. When it came to the few he did receive, most
callers hung up when he didn’t answer after five or six rings. But this time,
when the phone rang a possible record fourteenth time, Cade knew who it was.

He
picked up the phone. “Why do I have the feeling this isn’t a social call?”

On
the other end of the line, Riley chuckled. “Because you’re psychic, that’s
why. Isn’t that why they ran you out of the Order?”

“Very
funny. They wish it were that simple.”

There
was a moment of silence as Cade waited for Riley to tell him why he was calling.
When the silence stretched for too long, Cade said, “Well, nice chatting with
you, but I’ve got to...”

Riley
cut him off. “Sorry, man, just trying to figure out if I really want to pull
you back into this mess.”

“You
wouldn’t have called if you didn’t need something. And I’ll be the judge of
whether or not I get involved, okay? Out with it.”

The
command tone fell back into his speech automatically and he almost laughed when
Riley responded to it by getting right to the point.

“The
Necromancer’s escaped.”

“So
I heard.”

Another pause, then, “We tracked him to Bridgeport, to an old warehouse
down by the harbor.”

Cade
frowned. Bridgeport wasn’t more than twenty minutes from where he now stood.
What
was the Necromancer doing out here?

“He
performed some kind of...a ritual, I guess you’d call it. Like nothing I’ve
ever seen before. Near as we can tell he split as soon as he was finished, and
I suspect he is long gone by now, but the power that’s still lingering here
feels dangerous as hell. I was hoping I might convince you to come take a
look...”

Cade
didn’t say anything, just let the silence linger as he thought it through. The
Order had forced him out and truth be told, that didn’t make him all that
inclined to help them now. Yes, he’d disobeyed a direct order, but he’d
believed at the time – and still did today – that the order had been illegal. In
disobeying it, he had saved not just a valued member of the Order but quite
possibly society as they knew it. Rather than acknowledge that the end result
of his actions had been for the betterment of all concerned, the Powers That Be
had decided to assuage the Preceptor’s bruised ego.

Those
were not the kind of men Cade wanted to work for.

But...and
here’s where things got sticky.

It
wasn’t the Order that was asking. Or, at least, not after he sent their
mealy-mouthed messengers packing. No, this was Riley. A man who had literally
gone to Hell and back with him just because he’d been asked.

He
couldn’t send his friend away empty-handed.

Cade
weighed Riley’s request against the security he had set up on the property to
protect Gabrielle during the times when he had to go out. The wards were
extremely powerful – he’d certainly paid enough for them to be – and he was
confident they would stand up to even a determined attack. If Logan had just
performed a major working, there was no way he would have enough energy left
over to breach the barrier.

Besides,
he thought,
Riley says he’s long gone and I would be too if I knew the Order
was tracking me.

“Bridgeport,
you said?”

Cade
could all but hear Riley’s sigh of relief. “Yes, by the harbor. I’ll send a
car for you.”

Cade
was already shaking his head, even though Riley couldn’t see it. “No. Don’t
do that. I’ll catch a cab and you can give me a lift back yourself when we’re
done. Fair enough?”

“If
that’s how you want to play it.”

“I
do. Give me the address.”

After
memorizing the street and property number, Cade told Riley to give him an hour
and he’d be there as soon as he could.

After
hanging up with Riley, Cade called a cab company he had used in the past, told
them he needed to go to Bridgeport but not the exact address, and then spent
several minutes reviewing the state of the wards protecting the house, making
certain they were operating properly. Satisfied, he climbed the stairs to the
second floor and double checked the padlock he had installed on the outside of
the door to Gabrielle’s bedroom. The lock was for her protection as much as
his; she would be safe inside the room if she awoke during one of the brief
periods when he was not at home and he would have time to assuage her mental
condition before letting her out into the rest of the house. It pained him to
have to lock her in; but if it kept her safe, it was the least he could do.
Satisfied, he returned to the kitchen.

The
last thing he did before leaving was take the .45 out of the drawer and slip it
into the pocket of his coat. It wasn’t that he was expecting trouble or that
he didn’t think the Templars would be carrying adequate weapons, for he knew
they would be.

It
was simply that these days, after all he’d been through, he never went anywhere
without being armed.

Often
in more ways than one.

––––––––

A
s
soon as they entered the neighborhood where the warehouse was located, the
cabbie, a student from Fairfield University trying to earn some extra bucks
working the night shift, began to get cold feet, just as Cade had known he would.
Cade watched him grow more nervous by the moment until at last the cabbie’s
courage gave up and he pulled over to the curb at least two blocks from their
destination.

“Gonna
have to let you off here, man. It’s a bad neighborhood and I’m not going any
farther.”

Cade
knew it didn’t make any sense to argue; he could see by the way the man’s hands
were jittering that this was as close to the warehouse as he was going to get.
He paid the driver – even added a reasonable tip in the interests of not doing
anything to make him stand out in the driver’s memory – and then got out of the
cab.

The
cabbie barely waited for Cade’s feet to hit the sidewalk before he pulled away
and hustled off down the block as fast as he could.

Cade
was in an industrial neighborhood, with darkened office buildings and large,
looming warehouses sealed off from the street behind twelve foot steel fences
topped with rows of barbed wire. A lone hooker stood beneath the streetlight
at the end of the block and she eyed him hopefully for a moment until he turned
and headed in the other direction. She shouted something at his back in
Spanish, but he was too far away to hear what she said clearly.

Better
not to know,
he thought.

He
strode forward with determined steps, his head held high, projecting an aura of
menace. He wanted those watching from the shadows of the buildings around him
that he was like them.

Predator.
Not prey.

They
got the message and left him alone.

After
ten minutes of walking, Cade reached the address Riley had given him over the
phone. The gate to the property was open and he could see three black SUVs
pulled up inside the yard, facing the entrance to the building. As he drew
closer, a shadow detached itself from the side of the building.

Cade
tensed, but then a familiar voice said, “There goes the neighborhood.”

Riley.

“Who
are you kidding?” Cade shot back. “Property values fell into the toilet the
minute you stepped out of your truck.”

The
two men came together and embraced, slapping each other on the back and
laughing in the process. They were opposites in a way. Riley was tall and
muscular, where Cade was average height and wiry. Cade was white with a head
full of hair, where Riley had shaved his skull several years ago and was dark.
Despite their physical differences, they had a lot in common intellectually and
spiritually. Cade was genuinely glad to see his friend and former teammate; it
had been awhile.

As
they pulled apart, Riley said, “Hear you told the Preceptor to put it where the
sun don’t shine.”

“Yeah.
He’s lucky I didn’t show up to deliver the message in person.”

“Wouldn’t
that have been a sight. Can’t imagine why he thought you’d just drop
everything and come running back to help out, but I’m glad you’re here now.”

Cade
knew that tone and snipped Riley’s hopes right in the bud lest there be some
confusion later. “I’m here to take a look around and give you some advice.
That’s it. Nothing more; nothing less.”

“Right.”

Cade
turned and looked at the building a few feet away. It didn’t look like much,
just an old warehouse. Then again, true evil never did look the way you
expected it to look. In some ways, that was a sure sign of its power, to blend
in with everything around it and hide from scrutiny until it had spread like a
cancer through the space around it.

Cade
noticed that Riley was making an effort to look everywhere but at the building
and alarm bells went off in his head.

“Something
I should know about?” he asked.

Riley’s
shrugged. “I don’t know. Something just doesn’t...feel right.”

They
were talking about the Necromancer. Of course it didn’t feel right. He said
as much to Riley.

But
the other man shook his head. “It’s not that,” he said. He was silent a
moment and then added, “The whole thing just feels staged. Like I’m missing
something obvious and it’s gonna come back and bite me in the ass. You ever
get that feeling?”

All
the time
, Cade thought, but didn’t say anything, not wanting to interrupt
Riley’s flow of thoughts.

“I
mean, I’ve been in places where the Necromancer has used his particular brand
of magick and it always leaves a certain residue in the air, a greasy feeling
that just kind of hangs about. Some of it’s him, some of it’s the nature of
the magick he uses, but whenever he’s tried to do something, a ritual or a
spell or a working of just about any kind, that feeling is there.”

He
glanced at the building and Cade realized it was frustration, not fear that had
Riley so agitated.

“That
feeling in the air is gone, if it was ever here in the first place. And given
what’s inside that room, it should be here. Should be here
in spades
. But
it’s not. And that makes me think I’m missing something.”

Cade
frowned. He trusted Riley and it wasn’t all that often that the big man was
wrong. At least not about something important like this. Now, more than ever,
he wanted to see inside the warehouse.

“Still
not going to give me an specifics, huh?”

Riley
shook his head. “I’ve done enough already to prejudice your opinion. No sense
making it any worse. There are several bodies and a fair bit of blood, but
that’s all I’m going to say for now. We can talk more once you’ve had a chance
to take a look.”

Fair
enough,
Cade thought,
fair enough
.

“All
right, let’s do this then.”

––––––––

R
iley
led Cade into the warehouse and past the shipping containers toward the rear of
the building. Several of the other knights called out to say hello; many of
them had served under Cade at one point or another and still respected him as
both a knight and a warrior. Those who had not, who might see him through
different colored lenses, wisely chose to keep their opinions to themselves.
This was the Echo Team, after all, and the prestige it enjoyed now was due
entirely to the efforts of the man now walking through their midst.

When
they reached the bodies, Riley stepped to one side, out of the way, so that Cade
could do what he’d come to do.

He
began by standing and looking out over the scene, trying to get a feel for the
ritual in general. While he didn’t think of himself as an expert on mystical
rites and black magick, he did have a fair amount of experience with them, both
as a result of being the Echo Team commander for so many years as well as his
general research into the subject while tracking the enemies of the Order.

The
fact that blood sacrifices had been made, human sacrifices at that and more
than one, meant that the summoner thought an incredible amount of energy was
going to be needed for the rite. Usually this meant the caster was trying to
summon something from the infernal realms, anything from a minor demon to a
major one, but Cade didn’t get the sense that such was the case here. For one
the iconography within the summoning circle was incorrect, never mind the fact
that you didn’t use a five pointed star when trying to call something from the
nether regions. Plus Cade had picked up on the same lack of negative energy
that Riley had.

He
walked over to one of the corpses lying on the floor and squatted down beside
it. Cade put the man in his mid-thirties and guessed that he was mostly likely
homeless, given the condition of his clothing and the amount of dirt that was
caked under his fingernails. The man’s throat had been cut and the size of the
wound made the cause of death pretty obvious.

And
yet...

Something
wasn’t right. Something about the wound in the man’s throat...

Cade
bent closer for a better look.

The
cut was even and extended all the way across the front of the man’s neck, right
about where his Adam’s apple would be. The cut was very deep; the knife had
been extremely sharp and had been applied with force.

Most
likely from behind,
Cade thought.

Cade
stood up, took another look down at the body, and frowned.

If
the cut had been made from behind with one swift movement, as appearances
seemed to suggest, then blood should have sprayed outward all over the man’s
clothing as his heart kept beating in an effort to keep him alive. But except
for some blood splashed over the neck of his shirt, his clothes were free of
it.

That
wasn’t possible.

Cade
stood and moved over to the next body. Another male, younger this time,
probably in his late teens, early twenties. This victim was better dressed;
football jersey, clean blue jeans, shiny white sneakers. The same sort of
wound bisected his neck and, like the first, the lack of blood across his
clothing was telling.

They
were already dead when their throats were cut.

Cade
knew he was right. Still, he checked the other three bodies arranged around
the casting circle just to be certain. In the end, all of them had the same
wound and the same damning evidence.

“Find
something?” Riley asked, after watching Cade move from corpse to corpse.

“In
a minute,” Cade said, not yet ready to give his conclusions. He had a few more
things he wanted to check out. Like seeing all this through his Sight.

Several years ago, Cade had
barely survived an encounter with a supernatural entity he’d come to know as
the Adversary. The battle had resulted in what he thought had been the death of
his wife, Gabrielle, and had left him scarred both physically and emotionally.
He’d lost the sight in his right eye and the flesh on that side of his face had
been savagely disfigured, leaving him with a wide band of scar tissue that
stretched from the hairline above his eye, down across his cheekbone, and
around behind his ear. The eye itself was still intact, but was nothing more
than a milky white orb floating in a sea of damaged flesh. He was wearing an
eye patch over the scar tissue now as he habitually did when he was out and
about in public but he knew the patch wouldn’t interfere with what he intended
to do next.

While the damage to his eye
had cost him his ability to see in any normal sense of the word, he had gained
something unexpected in return. When he moved his ruined eye just so, the
supernatural world was revealed to him in all its so-called glory. Nothing could
hide from his Sight; he could see through the guises of demons and angels
alike, as well as anything in between. Mystical power was as obvious to him as
a mountain in the middle of a desert plain. For short periods of time he could
even see into the Beyond, that mystical world between the lands of the living
and those of the dead, if he chose to do so, all without setting foot outside
his own plane of reality. Doing so revealed him to the denizens of that realm,
however, and since they could be some nasty sons-of-bitches he didn’t do it all
that often.

He didn’t have to go that
far now, though. If there had been a ritual conducted here, especially one
powerful enough to require the sacrifice of six human beings, should have left
psychic echoes all over the place. He should have no trouble examining them
with his Sight and, in doing so, would hopefully learn more about the reason
for the rite in the first place.

Stepping back, Cade closed
his eyes for a moment and then opened them again, moving his damaged eye just
so in the process.

Much of the spiritual world
is driven by emotion, with objects and locations taking on the predominant
feelings surrounding them. In a building where human sacrifices had been
carried out, Cade expected to see the place crawling with the impact of all the
fear, pain, and despair the victims had felt and was only partially surprised
when he didn’t see it. The lack of it told him far more than its presence
would have. He’d been right, the killings could not have taken place here.

But that didn’t mean there
was nothing to see.

Loose, smoke-like tendrils
of shifting green-black power connected each of the corpses on the floor to the
ritual circle between them and a larger vein of power connected the circle with
the corpse on the frame. Even now there seemed to be some energy pulsing
between them, as if the bodies in front were feeding energy of some kind to the
one behind them.

What the hell?

Cade had never seen its like.

Along with his Sight, the
Adversary had passed on another unique ability to Cade, one he called his
Gift. The proper name for it was psychomery, he’d later found out, the ability to divine information about an
object or its owner through physical contact.

It
had been seven years since the Gift was thrust upon him, but in that time he
still had not grown comfortable using it. He wondered if he ever would.

It
wasn’t the loss of tactile sensation that bothered him so much. He’d become
accustomed to how things felt through the thin material of the latex gloves he
always wore. And it wasn’t as if he was unable to touch things at all. When
he was at home safely surrounded by his own possessions, he would often move
about the house without his gloves on, doing just that for hours at a time. His
home was his sanctuary; no one else was allowed inside, in order to limit the
psychic latencies that might be left behind.

Nor was it the fact that using the
psychometry brought a degree of physical danger, for he had never been one to
shy away from the possibility of physical injury. On past occasions he’d emerged
from sessions confused, disoriented, at times even uncertain of his own
identity. He’d even bitten one of his teammates once, after seeing visions of
hungry revenants rampaging about.

No, his discomfort lay in the way the Gift
had come to him. There was little doubt that the Adversary meant to kill him
on that summer night and had only failed by the smallest of margins. But
something had been left behind, some kind of residue or catalyst that resulted
in his Gift, his Sight, and the nature of their origin would always make him
uneasy.

Still, he’d be the first to admit that his
powers had certainly been helpful over the years in tracking down the supernatural
threats and enemies that plagued humankind. Which was why he would continue
using them for precisely that purpose.

Like now.

He squatted next to the nearest corpse and
stripped off the flesh-colored latex glove that covered his right hand. Mentally
bracing himself for what was to come, Cade reached out and grasped the hand of
the corpse.