Jack Templar and the Lord of the Demons (The Jack Templar Chronicles Book 5) (12 page)

T
he village
of Anghiari looked like it was frozen in a different time. Cobblestoned streets were lined with one and two story buildings built with brick and plaster, deep earth tones baked into them from centuries of weather. Few cars lined the roads, and those that did looked to be from the 1950s or 60s. Most were farm trucks with wood cargo beds in the back for transporting vegetables and livestock. We passed the main square in town. Like most small villages we’d seen in Northern Italy, this one had a small fountain in the middle of the square. What made this one different was the surprisingly ornate stonework. There were great gargoyles carved into the stone, their faces twisted as if in agony.

The square also had a church, several restaurants, and shops. There were tourists there, sticking out with their short shorts and tacky T-shirts, but not many. Anghiari was too far-off the beaten path to be an easy stop for day-trippers from Milan or Genoa so the town was likely pretty much left alone, slowly passing through history, only changing when times demanded it.

A big sign in the town square with an artist’s rendering of the monastery pointed us in the right direction. A short road off the square ended at a gate blocking a narrow gravel road that twisted its way up the hill. To the right of the gate was a turnstile and a ticket office.

Lucky day. Seemed the monks were selling tickets to look at the gate to the Underworld. We walked up to the ticket office, digging in our pockets for cash. An old woman barely looked up from the book she was reading and held out her hand.

“Hi,” I said, “how much is it?”

Still not looking up, the old woman rapped her knuckles on the window in front of her where a piece of scrap paper with a “3” on it was taped. I leaned in to see what she was reading and had to stifle a laugh when I saw a Percy Jackson book. I’d read them back in Sunnyvale, in retrospect understanding why I was drawn to a story about a young boy fighting monsters. I remembered that in those books the gateway to the Underworld was conveniently located behind the Hollywood sign in California. I wished I had it that easy.

We dug through our pockets and handed over the six euros for admission. The old lady finally looked up at us, and I didn’t like the way she reacted. Her first bored glance was what I was expecting, but then she did a double-take and looked us over like she knew exactly who we were, her shrewd old eyes narrowing as she pursed her thin lips together.

“Excuse me, do I know you?” I asked.

The woman looked down at the ground, mumbled something I couldn’t hear, and then waved us toward the turnstile. I wanted to ask her again, certain there had been recognition in her eyes and not just curiosity, but she was already hunched back over her book, deep into the adventures of Percy, Annabelle, and Grover. I found myself wishing for a few demigod powers of my own. It sure would have made this quest a lot easier.

Daniel and I walked through the turnstile.

“What was all that about?” he asked.

“No idea,” I replied. “But I could have sworn she recognized us somehow.”

“Do you think she’s a Creach? You’re usually pretty good about telling.”

I shook my head. “I couldn’t get a good read on her. She might be.”

Daniel craned his neck up and looked at the monastery hulking above us. “I guess the whole place could have been taken over by demons ages ago. We could be walking right into a trap.” He turned to me as if he just had an epiphany. “The arrow we thought Aquinas left. The box we found. That could be part of it. Left there by whatever creach army burned down the farmhouse.”

I thought about it and had to admit he was right. We had no way of knowing whether Aquinas or some very clever Creach monster had left the box for us, maybe one of Draxo’s henchmen. The way the old lady looked at us didn’t help either.

“You might be right,” I said. “That’s another good reason we didn’t get a rhyming riddle to solve this time. But we need to check it out. And if it is a trap, would you rather it was just us that got caught in it or the whole group?”

Daniel grinned and patted the sword under his jacket. “Oh, I wasn’t worrying that it was a trap. I was
hoping
. If there are a bunch of creach up there waiting for us, it’s going to be a blast.”

He strode through the turnstile and started the climb up the gravel path. I wished I felt his confidence. Whether it was wishful thinking on Daniel’s part or not, the idea left me paranoid. I felt my own sword hidden under my clothes even though I knew it was there. The feel of hard iron always made me feel better. With a deep breath, I pushed through the turnstile and hurried after Daniel.

Weeks on the road had left little time for training, so I was winded by the time we got to the top of the path. Daniel, who probably was in better shape than I was even in his human form, barely felt anything with the werewolf blood in him. Even with the weird strength I’d developed since my fourteenth birthday, I had to take a little break at the top to catch my breath.

Daniel smirked. “You need to work out more.”

“Yeah, or just become a werewolf,” I replied. As soon as I said the words, I winced, not sure if they were funny or hurtful.

I didn’t need to worry though. Since wearing the Templar Ring, Daniel was back to his old self. He laughed, pointed a finger at me, and bared his teeth. “I can make that happen for you,” he said. “Don’t you forget it.”

The path ended at two massive black iron doors, both swung open, leaving a wide enough space to drive a truck through. Or, more likely, a horse-drawn cart. Through the doors was a large receiving room with stone pillars and smooth stone floor.

“Age before beauty,” I said to Daniel.

“Technically I have the blood of a two-thousand year old werewolf in me,” Daniel whispered as he walked by me. “And God knows I’m more beautiful than you, even wearing this fake nose. I should go first twice.”

I grinned, happy to have him with me. For some reason, my instincts were telling me something was wrong about this place. I chalked it up to nerves and the weird reception from the woman in the ticket booth. But when I walked through the door and crossed over the threshold of the monastery, a deep chill passed through my body, a cold I felt down to my bones. It felt like jumping into ice water, so much so that it took my breath away, and I gasped. It must have been loud because Daniel spun around to look at me with concern.

A second later, the feeling was gone. We were inside, yet I couldn’t help but feel that unless we turned and ran, we didn’t stand much of a chance of ever getting back out. I pushed the sensation out of my mind and tried to focus on what we were there to do.

Turns out I should have listened to my instincts. We should have run for our lives when we had the chance.

T
he entrance room
looked like a museum after most of its artifacts had been stolen in some big heist. Tapestries hung here and there, but they were a little off-center on the walls and never quite level. Wood display cases spread throughout the room, but most were empty, and the few that had anything in them just held old books or pieces of pottery without any indication of what they were. An elderly couple shuffled by one of the empty cases, paused, then kept walking to the next one.

“Worst. Museum. Ever.” Daniel whispered.

He had a point. “Let’s try to find access to the pit. It has to be on the lower level, right?”

We crossed the sad excuse for a museum and exited through a wide passageway to our right. I noticed the hallway curved inward to our left so we lost sight of the corridor twenty or thirty feet in front of us. We followed it, periodically coming across a set of wood stairs that went up to the floor above. Each staircase was sealed off with a thin red ribbon stretched across it and tied to one of the posts. Not exactly high security, but judging from the contents of the museum, I doubted there was much up there the monks worried about people stealing.

The rough rock to our right had to be the outer monastery wall, but I couldn’t figure out why there were no doors leading deeper into the interior of the building. It only took a few minutes for us to make a complete lap around the circumference of the building and end up back in the museum with the old couple staring at a sad piece of broken pottery.

“I guess we need to go up one level,” I said, leading the way back to the hallway.

“Makes sense, actually. This lower level acts almost like a moat in defensive terms. Once an attacker got in through the main gate, the monks in the levels above could just seal off the doors.”

“Until someone lit a fire,” I said.

Daniel nodded. “Good point.”

We got to the first set of stairs, took a quick look around and then hopped over the red ribbon. We took the steps two at a time and quickly made it to the top. True to Daniel’s guess, we exited the stairs through an opening in the second level floor. Once through, we looked back and saw a massive boulder suspended in the air over the hole, wrapped in rusted metal chain net and anchored to the ceiling with thick ropes. The boulder swayed gently as if there were a breeze coming up from the level below. Nothing about it looked safe.

“That explains how they sealed the lower level,” I said.

“These guys aren’t messing around,” Daniel replied, eyeing the boulder. “We’re lucky it didn’t come down on our heads.”

I looked down the hallway. It was just like the one on the lower level. We glanced both ways to make sure there was no one there and then started a slow jog around the circle.

Once again, there were stairs going up to the next level and the stairs going down, but no way to the inside of the building. We made an entire loop and got back to where we started.

“This is nuts,” I said. “It’s got to be the worst designed building ever.”

“What’s strange is that we haven’t seen anyone on either level except for the old couple in the museum,” Daniel said.

I remembered that weird feeling I had when I first entered the building. A pit formed in my stomach as my instinct told me something was wrong. Still, we had a job to do. It would do us no good to leave without knowing where the entrance to the Underworld was – if it even existed.

“Let’s check out the next level up,” I said.

We climbed over the red ribbon stretched across the stairs and headed up, slower this time, a little unsettled by the strange building. As we neared the top of the stairs, there was another boulder swaying over the exit, the chains on this one looking even more fragile than the last. We paused just before our heads reached the level where the boulder would reach us if it fell.

“If this were a trap,” Daniel said, “we’d be the stupidest monster hunters in the world to get caught in it. I mean, we’re staring right at it.”

“If it were a trap, they could have gotten us on the last staircase,” I said. It sounded like a logical argument, but even I didn’t feel convinced. There was something
wrong
about this place. I could feel it. It was like the pressure in the air when a thunderstorm arrives, in those few moments just before the wind kicks up and the rain slashes out of a sky backlit by a hundred strikes of lightning.

Daniel looked at me. “Are you sure about this?”

I thought about it, looked up at the boulder above us, then shook my head. “No, not really.”

Daniel nodded. “Let me go first.”

“No, I’ll go,” I said.

Daniel seemed to consider my offer. “Pick a number between one and ten.”

“What?”

“Just pick a number,” he said. “Between one and ten.”

“Seven,” I said.

“Nope.”

Without another word, he sprinted past me, cleared the stairs, and jumped out onto the landing. The boulder didn’t move.

“Come on,” came Daniel’s voice from above. “There’s no boogeymen monks up here ready to cut the ropes.”

I strode up the stairs. “You’re crazy. You at least could have –”

THWACK!

I heard the sound before I saw any movement. My mind immediately registered it as a really bad thing.

I sprang forward, ducking low and pulling my legs up behind me in a tuck position. Good thing too because the boulder crashing down from above grazed the edge of my boot on its way to smashing into the hole covering the staircase, inches away from smashing me.

I spun on the ground to look down the hallway. The boulder on the next staircase below crashed down. I couldn’t see any farther along the bend in the curve, but I could feel the building vibrate as boulder after boulder sealed off each staircase.

I scrambled to my feet. Daniel and I stood back to back, swords drawn, turning in a slow circle to look for attackers.

“I guess it’s closing time,” he said.

“Something tells me we’re the only ones left in the place,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “How about these guys?”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw the hallway that direction filled with monks in black robes, hoods pulled down low over their faces. They stood five across and at least ten deep, marching toward us with military precision. As I spun around, I saw another group of them approaching from the other direction. We were pinned between them.

“These guys don’t look so tough,” Daniel said.

“Yeah, they probably sit around reading books and eating pie all day,” I said nervously.

As if on cue, each of the monks slid his right hand under his robe and pulled out a sword. They pushed back their hoods. These were no soft men. These were the faces of lean warriors, grizzled with the intense stare of veteran fighters.

“Pie, huh?” Daniel asked.

The monks came to a precise stop ten feet to either side of us. They stood there, frozen, staring at us.

I felt Daniel shuffle his feet as the seconds dragged on. I had a sudden fear that he meant to charge headlong into them.

“Steady,” I said. I raised my voice. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake. We didn’t know the monastery closed at five.”

The monks didn’t move. The row nearest me all wore an expression that was a combination of a sneer and contempt.

“Did you think that was going to work?” Daniel whispered under his breath.

I shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

A shuffling noise came from in front of me. By craning my neck, I saw the rows of monks parting to allow someone through. I crouched a little lower to the ground, ready for an attack if it came. But when the monks stood aside, they revealed an old man. He wore the same black robes as the rest, with the only difference a thin silver belt cinched at his midsection. Grey hair flowed past his shoulders and a beard reached his chest. He walked over and looked me up and down. Finally, he said, “Jack Templar, we’ve been waiting for you.”

“You knew I was coming?” I asked.

“I know more than that,” the old man said. “I know all about your quest. Most important, and I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but you’ve reached the part of your journey where you and your friends must finally die.”