Infernal Cries: An Echo Team Urban Fantasy Novel Page 12

  Cade’s martial skill and the added protection of his thick leather jacket kept him from suffering any serious wounds, though he was bleeding from half-a-dozen minor injuries by the time the hounds made their first mistake.

  One of them rushed in from the side while Cade was engaged with its brethren in the front, but the wintery ground betrayed it and it slid too far forward, opening itself up to a blow from Cade’s sword. He didn’t hesitate, either, just lashed out with the edge and nodded with grim satisfaction as the snow was splashed red from the hound’s severed throat.

  With one of their number eliminated, Cade’s task of defense became easier. The fight continued for another few minutes, until a second of the creatures rushed forward, slipped beneath Cade’s sword, and clamped Cade’s left arm in its mouth. No doubt the hound had intended to drag him forward and into range of the other beast, but Cade had anticipated that and when he felt the teeth clamp around his forearm he rammed his sword up through the underside of the hound’s jaw and out the top of its skull, killing it instantly.

  With two of its companions dead or dying, the third hound decided it had had enough and slunk off into the darkness to lick its wounds, leaving Cade to try to catch his breath.

  By the time he had, the zombie was long gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Later that night.

  Simon Logan stood in the shadows on the other side of the room and watched the woman’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, as her body drew breath into her lungs and let it out again with a barely discernible hiss.

  It looked like she was sleeping, but he knew better.

  Her body was an empty vessel.

  Her heartbeat, her blood flowed, but there was nothing of substance inside. Her spirit had been torn free of her mortal frame and now wandered elsewhere.

  He liked to imagine her in some dark place somewhere, lost and afraid.

  He knew her soul still existed somewhere because she had spent weeks tormenting him in his cell, returning night after night to haunt him mercilessly until he had agreed to get a message to her husband, Knight Commander Williams.

  It seemed their love united them, even in death.

  How charming.

  Logan felt his heart race and the blood pound in his veins as he considered that fact. The wife of his most fervent enemy, here, in his grasp.

  Defenseless.

  It was almost too good to be true.

  He walked forward and stood over her. Her eyes were open, staring upward, but he knew she wasn’t seeing him. He reached down and ran a finger slowly down the side of her face, across her chin, and down between her breasts until stopped by the buttons of her dress. She had a lush body, one that he would have enjoyed taking against her will, repeatedly in fact, if there had even been a spark of awareness, of independent will, left inside it.

  But there was not; he’d used his considerable powers to know the truth of that.

  Her body was but an empty shell, waiting for her soul to come home.

  Too bad that’s never going to happen.

  When the dead first whispered to him of the woman sharing William’s house, he was simply focused on finding a way to use that information against his enemy. But then he began to think about the situation, to see how best to turn it to his advantage, and he realized that he had a far greater opportunity before him than he’d previously realized.

  Williams loved his wife. He had spent years tracking the entity that he felt was responsible for her death and had left honor and duty behind in order to care for her body when he discovered she had not passed into the afterlife. This was a man who would walk straight into hell itself if it meant there was a chance to return her to his side.

  It was that love that Logan was using against Williams, that had forced him to carry out Logan’s commands; to recover the very items Logan needed to bring his plans to fruition.

  How exquisite, he thought. Using the very thing that binds Cade and his wife together so strongly as the linchpin that will tear them apart forever.

  He looked down at the helpless woman in front of him with satisfaction.

  “Soon,” he whispered to the empty air around him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Riley didn’t know what to do next. He sat in the cafeteria, shoveling down some lunch that he couldn’t even remember ordering, and wondering what to do next.

  His team had been going over what little evidence they had for days and still didn’t have a single lead worth talking about. The Preceptor was growing impatient and was starting to make Riley’s life difficult as a result, constantly looking for updates or suggesting plans of action with little or no thought to how they would affect other parts of the operation. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything more the Echo Team leader could do about it. As far as he could tell, both Simon Logan and Cade Williams had gone down a hole and pulled it in after them.

  Echo had been focusing most of their attention on the Necromancer. Rightly so, in Riley’s opinion. The Necromancer was the known threat, the one who had attacked Templar commanderies, had colluded with infernal creatures, and had attempted to use the power of the Spear of Longinus for personal gain. If Echo hadn’t locked him up, he would have continued in the same vein, leaving a trail of death and destruction in his wake.

  Clearly the tiger hadn’t changed its stripes. He’d left three missing, presumed dead, during his escape and then, only a few hours later, a warehouse full of bodies. Who knew what the hell he’d be up to next?

  Riley knew Cade was in this up to his eyeballs – the phone call in Paris had made that abundantly clear – but Riley didn’t think it was by choice. Somehow the Necromancer had coerced him into cooperating and Riley would bet a month’s pay that it had something to do with Gabrielle.

  He’d fought beside Cade for years. The Knight Commander might like to play loose and fast with the rules now and then, but he had his own rigid code of ethics and part of that was making certain that innocent bystanders didn’t get hurt. If you were working with the enemy, then God help you – Cade could be a ruthless son of a bitch – but those who were on the side of righteousness had nothing to fear from the man. The way the monk had been treated in Paris was proof of that; Riley was certain Cade had simply been trying to incapacitate the man and hadn’t intended to put him in the hospital with so severe an injury. From Riley’s perspective, Cade was as much a victim of this whole mess as that elderly monk was.

  Perhaps it was time to look at things a little differently, however.

  They’d had no luck tracking the Necromancer, so maybe they should focus their efforts on tracking Cade instead. If he was working for Logan, especially if he’d been coerced into doing so, then maybe finding Cade could help them find the real problem, Simon Logan.

  It’s worth a shot, he thought.

  He got up from the table, dumped what was left of his half-eaten lunch into the trash bin, and headed to the suite of offices he had commandeered for his investigative team to comb through the mountains of information collected from law enforcement agencies all across the country on a daily basis, looking for any clue that might tell them where the Necromancer had gone.

  Riley stood in the doorway and scanned the room, looking for one tech in particular. When he found her, he made a beeline for her station.

  “I need you, McGreevy,” he said, as he came up behind her.

  “Uh huh,” she said, without turning. “That’s what they all say. Then they don’t call, they don’t write, and before you know it…”

  The sudden silence must have clued her in. She looked over her shoulder, saw Riley, and nearly had a heart attack if the look on her face was any indication.

  “Knight Captain Riley!” she exclaimed, her face flushed with embarrassment for talking to a senior officer in such a fashion. She shoved her chair back, intending to jump to her feet with a salute, and promptly ran over his foot.

  It just wasn’t her day, it seemed.

  Riley eventually got
her to stop apologizing and got her seated back in front of her workstation.

  McGreevy was a computer whiz, one of those kids who could have gone to MIT at the age of fourteen but whose family situation required her to stay at home and care for her younger siblings. Then, several years later, she’d suffered the horror of watching her entire family – mother, father, brother and sister – slaughtered at the hands of a rogue vampire. When Delta Team had been dispatched to deal with the rampaging bloodsucker, they’d found McGreevy standing over the smoldering corpse of the vampire with a can of extra strength hairspray and her mother’s cigarette lighter in her hands. With everything she’d had to live for taken away from her, the Order had stepped in and offered to help. McGreevy had been here ever since.

  “What can I do for you, Knight Captain?,” she squeaked out, as she tried to get her breathing, and her embarrassment, under control.

  “I need you to hand off whatever you’re working on to someone else. I’ve got something else that's more important.”

  “Okay,” she said, then tapped out a few things on her keyboard. “Done. What do you have?”

  Riley frowned, but then decided he didn’t want to know. She probably had algorithmic scripts ready-made to handle a hundred different tasks, just the way Olsen used to…

  The thought of his old teammate put a knot the size of a golf ball in his throat and for a moment he couldn’t speak. Damn how he missed him! Olsen would have had this thing cracked in no time, no doubt about that.

  Riley cleared his throat and looked at McGreevy once more. She sat there patiently waiting and gave no sign that she’d noticed his emotional moment. He knew he wasn’t fooling her, but appreciated her courtesy nonetheless.

  He smiled, to show there were no hard feelings over the chair.

  “I need you to stop searching for Simon Logan and focus your efforts instead on Cade Williams.”

  “The Here…” she began, surprised, and then quickly changed tacks. “I mean, former Knight Commander Williams?”

  “The very same.”

  “Am I allowed to ask why?”

  “No, you are not,” he replied, but smiled when he said it to take the sting out of it.

  McGreevy shrugged. “You’re the boss. Anything in particular you want me to start with?”

  Riley grabbed a scratch pad off her desk and jotted down a list of names, about eight in all. He ripped off the page and handed it to her. “These are some of the fake IDs I remember him using in the past; I’m sure there are more in the database somewhere. Cross reference the names on the list with any electronic record you can get your hands on – credit card receipts, phone charges, hotel registrations, airline tickets, you name it. Start with Immigration in Paris. If he’s out there, I want to find him.”

  “Got it!”

  McGreevy turned away, intent on her computer, like a bloodhound on a scent, when Riley thought of something else.

  “How do we keep track of who is using which safe house on any given day?” he asked.

  She didn’t even have to think about it. “We can’t. We can tell which safe houses are being used due to the entry and alarm codes attached to every property, but the codes aren't tied to particular individuals.”

  Riley thought about that one for a moment. “So we can tell which house is occupied but not who is in it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good enough. Get me a list of houses that have been used in the last seventy hours, with a priority on those within a hundred mile radius of our present position.”

  “Got it.”

  Riley used the scratch pad again to jot down his cell number. “Call me the minute you have something.”

  “Will do.”

  It wasn’t much; he knew that. But at least they were moving in a new direction and that felt good.

  He’d crack this thing, one way or another.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Bruised and bleeding, Cade made his way back through the woods to the school parking lot where he’d left his car.

  To his relief, the vehicle was right where he had left it. He staggered over, unlocked the trunk, and put his sword inside but kept the pistol with him. He’d take the chance of someone seeing it on the seat beside him, as there was no way he was going to be walking around empty-handed, not after the last few days. He shut the trunk and returned to the front seat. No sooner had he settled in behind the wheel than the phone in his pocket chimed.

  Digging it out, he discovered he had a text.

  Test me again and I’ll skin your beautiful wife and wear her flesh as a cloak.

  Cade had to use all of his control to keep from hurling the phone against the windshield. If he did that, and it broke, he’d have no way of reaching the Necromancer.

  Cade was going to kill him, there was no doubt about that, but for now he fought for control and just managed to hold onto his anger. Barely.

  His phone chimed again.

  The Staff of Anubis. You know where it is.

  48 hours.

  “You have got to be fuckin’ kidding me!” he said. Logan was correct; Cade did know where the Staff of Anubis was. He’d been the one to secure it on the Order’s behalf. Given the power the staff was believed to control, there was only one place the Order would feel safe storing it.

  In the vault-like reliquary deep beneath the Bristol commandery.

  Only one of the most guarded places in all of North American, particularly after Logan and his cronies had broken into it half-a-year ago!

  How the hell was he going to break into the reliquary and steal the staff without being seen? He had been in and out of the commandery so many times in the last several years that he knew most of the people stationed there on sight and vice versa. There was no way he was going to be able to slip inside without being noticed; someone was bound to see and recognize him.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” he said again.

  For what felt like the thousandth time he regretted his inability to control his travel via the mirror’s road. If he’d been able to control his Gift, getting in and out of the commandery would have been a snap. All he would have had to do was take a mirror to a secluded spot outside the commandery, step through it into the Beyond and then step back out again through a different gate into the reliquary. Finding a gate into the reliquary would have been easy; there was more than one mirror in the vault.

  Unfortunately, that’s not how it worked. Not with his level of skill, at least. Traveling in and out of the Beyond was a lot like playing Russian Roulette; you never knew where that next step was going to take you or if you’d even live to tell about it.

  No, he’d have to come up with a better idea.

  And he had less than forty-eight hours to do it.

  The sound of sirens in the distance caught his attention. Finally responding to all the gunshots, I guess, he thought, and decided that it was high time he got himself out of there before he was forced to deal with questions for which he didn’t have any real answers.

  Half-an-hour later Cade was soaking in the tub at the safe house, letting the super-heated water wash the blood from his flesh and ease the ache from his muscles. He got away with minimal damage, considering the threat he faced. The wound in his upper arm took four stitches to close, stitches he was forced to put in himself since he had no one to help him. The holy water he splashed over the injury before stitching it up to kill any infection hurt more than the sutures; the liquid bubbling and boiling like he’d just poured hot acid on his skin. It looked worse by the time he was done, but at least he was confident that he wasn’t going to catch some strange disease from the corpse hound’s claws. Who knew where those things had been?

  He laid his head back against the edge of the tub and wracked his brain for some idea of how he was going to penetrate the commandery and get inside the reliquary. He’d already wasted an hour and he still didn’t have a clue. Brute force was definitely out; they’d gun him down first and ask questions later.
Unfortunately, the stealth approach was also out of the question. He should know, for it had been his job to beef up the security in the face of the Necromancer’s attacks earlier that year. If they were still following his recommendations, a mouse couldn’t fart in that place without the Templars knowing about it.

  That left only subterfuge. He had an inkling of an idea as to how he might get onto the grounds – it wasn’t a great one but at least it would serve its purpose. He would still need to penetrate the vault after that and he didn’t have a clue how to go about doing so.

  He lay there, watching the steam rise from the surface of the water, insubstantial as a wraith, and felt the clock ticking down, minute by minute by minute.

  There had to be a way! he thought in frustration.

  He put his palms on either side of the tub and abruptly pushed himself out of the water. He couldn’t just sit there; he needed to be doing something.

  He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his body as he stepped over to the sink, intending to brush the sour taste of despair out of his mouth. The mirror above the sink was fogged from the steam and as he reached to wipe it away, his reflection flickered like a ghost in the background.

  As his palm wiped the condensation away, the realization of what his subconscious mind was trying to tell him for the last twenty minutes hit him like a runaway truck. He stood there, grinning stupidly at his reflection as he thought it through and decided that it might just work.

  First thing he had to do was get in touch with a dead man.

  Abrams lived on the third floor of an apartment building in Norwalk, the next town over from the safe house’s location. It took Cade less than ten minutes to drive over there, find a parking spot in the small dirt lot next door, and climb the three flights of stairs to Abrams’ apartment.

  He paused outside the door, pretending to be looking for his keys, as an Asian woman - Thai or maybe Philippino, Cade wasn’t certain – went past him and down the stairs to the next floor. When she was gone he leaned in toward the door, listening. He could hear voices in the background, but the laughter sounded canned and he suspected it was the television.