by Jeff Gunhus
Jack Templar and the Last Battle
Jeff Gunhus
Seven Guns Press
Contents
Copyright
Also by Jeff Gunhus
Dedication
Preface
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
JACK TEMPLAR AND THE LAST BATTLE
Copyright 2016 by Jeff Gunhus
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Seven Guns Press. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover design by Eric Gunhus
Cover Art by Nicole Cardiff
Edited by Sher A. Hart, Troon Harrison
Also by Jeff Gunhus
MG/YA FICTION
Jack Templar Monster Hunter
Jack Templar and the Monster Hunter Academy
Jack Templar and the Lord of the Vampires
Jack Templar and the Lord of the Werewolves
Jack Templar and the Lord of the Demons
Jack Templar and the Last Battle
ADULT FICTION
Night Chill
Night Terror
Killer Within
Killer Pursuit
The Torment of Rachel Ames
For my own monster hunters, Jack, Will, Daniel, Lina and Owen
And for Nicole who always smiles when she tells me to go write.
Preface
My name is Jack Templar and I am a monster hunter. I wasn’t always this way. In fact, before my fourteenth birthday, I had no idea the world was filled with monsters that lurked in the shadows, watching us, waiting for just the right time to rise up against humans and reclaim the world as their own.
But that’s the reality of things. This isn’t a work of fiction or some namby-pamby story with happy endings and heroes who always get it right. This is happening all around you. This is real. Get used to it.
If you’ve been with me on my adventures so far, you already know the drill. Reading this book makes you part of this world of monsters and shadows. Even if you were protected by the law of Quattuordecim because you haven’t turned fourteen yet, all bets are off if you’re reading this and the books that came before it.
You’re part of this world now. A world where the Black Watch is the only thing that guards against the coming war with the monsters. And if you want out, that’s too bad. Once a monster hunter, always a monster hunter. You have only one choice and that’s to …
Do your duty, come what may.
Jack Templar
Prologue
14 years ago
John Templar heard the screams coming from the castle walls far behind him. It was a mix of noise from both Creach and men. His men. They were the hunters who had volunteered to create the diversion that allowed him to sneak in through the old sewer system undetected. They’d known their chances of survival were slim. Judging by the ferocious clanging of metal swords and the guttural growls and high-pitched shrieks of the Creach staging the castle’s defense, they might have been overly optimistic. The chances of survival might have been zero.
This conclave of all the Creach Lords meant that the monsters his men faced weren’t the slow, dull-witted kind found in ancient forests or dark holes around the world. These were highly trained security forces, disciplined fighters with strong leadership, representing each of the Creach factions: vampire, werewolf, demon, zombie, and the catch-all group of lesser Creach, a motley collection of mug-wumps, trolls, ogres, blindsiders, shapeshifters and every other kind of monster not welcome in the four, pure blood groups. The men would put up a tough fight, but they’d all known the odds going into the mission. Whether their sacrifice was worthwhile or not depended completely on him, John Templar.
He checked once more for any sign of a guard before leaving the shelter of his hiding spot behind a decorative half wall. Seeing none, he broke into a run towards the stairs at the far end of the room. A man screamed in the battle below. Every fiber of John’s being told him to turn and run toward the sound. To join the fight and help his dying men. But he couldn’t. He had a job to do, and diving into the battle at the wall wasn’t part of it. He forced himself to run, swearing to make good on his promise to the men dying for the cause. He had convinced them it was worthwhile.
He would capture the five Jerusalem Stones and, once he had them, he would turn their power against the Lord of the Creach, Ren Lucre. The vampire had ruled for nearly a thousand years, a record among the Creach, but John didn’t care about that. All he cared about was ending the reign of Ren Lucre that night.
Only then would Angelica and her unborn child be safe from her father’s cruel power forever.
If he failed to acquire the Stones, he and Angelica’s child would surely die, as would all the brave men and women fighting at the castle walls. He refused to let that happen.
Distracted, John was a second too late reacting to the attack. Without thinking, he responded to movement on his right side by slashing his sword down. It sank into soft flesh. His attacker, a deformed troll, squealed in pain, its face twisted into a sneer. John gripped a dagger in his left hand and delivered a finishing blow into the creature’s throat, stifling the sound.
As the foul creature sagged to the floor, John felt an explosion of pain. He looked down to see a nasty troll knife sticking out of his side, just above his hip. There were barbed hooks along the part of the blade still exposed, and troll weapons had barbs along the entire length. If he pulled out the knife, it would rip a wide gash in his side. Until he was near medical help, it would have to stay there.
He’d be lying to say it didn’t hurt, but two decades of training under the watchful eye of Master Aquinas had taught him to work through pain when needed. After checking that the troll had no friends ready to attack further, he closed his eyes and took three slow breaths, each one bearing away more of the pain. He called on his conditioning to block his mind to the nerves in that area of his body. By the third breath, the knife in his side was no more than a dull ache. With that done, he kicked the troll at his feet for good measure, and then ran up the stairs.
He clutched his side as he ran. The pain was manageable now, but no amount of mind control could offset the effects of blood loss. Within a minute of his climb up, his chain mail and sword grew heavy. One glance showed blood covering his hand. Too much of this and he wouldn’t have the strength to face his final challenge. He pushed himself harder, grunting from the exertion.
The door
to the room at the top of the stairs was wide open. He didn’t like that. There ought to have been a guard. At least, the door should have been locked and sealed. Something was wrong.
Or maybe they’d finally caught a break and Angelica had managed to get there first and bring the Stones with her. If so, they were nearly through the ordeal. Against every odd stacked against them, they’d made it. Finally, they could be together. Not forever as she’d expected, but together in the bounds of a normal human lifetime. The Jerusalem Stones would deliver all of that to them.
He entered the room and the strength disappeared from his legs. He sagged to the ground, falling to his knees, and his sword fell from his hand.
“No,” he said. “This can’t be.”
Angelica, tall and beautiful, skin flushed with color in such contrast to the normal pale alabaster of her vampiric state, stood on the far side of the room with a baby in her arms. Their baby.
Behind them stood Ren Lucre.
Minotaurs, with muscled human bodies and bull heads, stepped from the shadows, each holding a massive sword. Ren Lucre’s personal guard. The old vampire had known John was coming. The whole thing had been a trap. And there was only one way that was possible.
Angelica, the woman he loved, had betrayed him.
But one look at her, the way she clutched the baby to her chest, the way the tears fell freely down her cheeks, told him it was not that simple.
Betrayal never was.
“It’s a boy, John” she whispered. “I named him Jack. And he’s beautiful.”
He kept his eyes fixed on her, certain that death would come from the nearest minotaur guard at any second. He wanted the last thing he saw in his life to be the woman he loved and the son he would never get to hold.
But the blow from the sword never arrived.
Instead, a blow of another kind came, one worse than any death or torture he could have imagined.
“Angelica!” he shouted, trying to cross the room to reach her. Minotaurs lunged forward to block his way, pulling him back with rough hands.
He struggled as much as he could, but they were too strong. He was forced to just stand there and watch as his wife, the mother of his child, his great love, greeted death with the serenity and calm that had always been her way.
With each passing second, Angelica aged faster. The years she had cheated in her vampire form caught up with her. Her perfect, smooth skin grew wrinkled and drawn. Her back slowly hunched over. Her hair grew long, turning first grey, then white, until thinning into a pale yellow.
John knew the tale of her father’s transformation at the hands of the old Roman vampire, Vitus, nearly a thousand years ago. And how he had transformed both Angelica and her sister, vowing never to lose them to something as cheatable as death in the way he had lost their mother. With sudden clarity, John understood. She’d used the Jerusalem Stones to turn herself human once again so that their child might live.
It’s a boy, John. I named him Jack. And he’s beautiful.
And now Death had come to collect his due.
“No!” Ren Lucre bellowed, the walls shaking from the sound.
Angelica fell to her knees, her dress shifting to reveal skin stretched tight over her skeletal frame. With thin, brittle arms, she carefully placed her baby on the floor. She turned to John, her face so wrinkled and sunken that it was barely recognizable. Except for her eyes. Her eyes shone with the same brilliance as always. And that’s what he stared at. That was the one part of her that was still her. He tried to tell her with his own eyes that he loved her. That he understood what she had done and why.
He could have sworn that her dried lips curled into a smile as one of her hands, not much more than a skeleton, reached toward him. Then the light in her eyes went out.
She fell over and her body collapsed into a pile of dust.
John screamed her name and struggled against his captors, sobbing. Ren Lucre walked to the pile of clothing on the ground, slowly picked it up and held it to his chest. The baby lying on the floor started to cry, big rasping wails as if he too felt the death of his mother. Ren Lucre stared at the small bundle on the floor. He walked up and placed the heel of his boot over the baby’s head.
“Please,” John said. “Don’t hurt him. If you loved her at all, don’t hurt him.”
Ren Lucre slowly looked up until the two men were staring eye-to-eye. “He’s human,” Ren Lucre said, the word coming out as a curse. He pulled back his foot and lowered it to the floor. He leaned down and picked the baby up roughly, making it erupt into pitiful wailing. “Quattuerodecim, the Auld magic, protects him until his fourteenth year. After that, he will die.” He pointed at John. “And you will be kept alive until then. Fourteen years for you to imagine the ways I might kill this boy. Fourteen years to conjure up all the terrible things I might do to him. And then one day, the waiting will be over and you’ll see your son die before your eyes just as I saw my daughter die before mine.”
“That boy is your grandchild,” John said. “There’s part of Angelica in him. Can’t you see that?”
Ren Lucre crossed to him, throwing Angelica’s dress at him in a cloud of dust. “That’s all that’s left of my daughter,” Ren Lucre bellowed. “Dust. Nothing but dust.” He held the baby up by one arm as it howled in pain. “This abomination will be disposed of when the law allows it. And you will be there to watch. That I swear to you.”
Ren Lucre shoved the baby into the arms of a minotaur guard and strode from the room.
“The boy’s name is Jack,” John shouted after him. “Jack Templar. Remember the name, Ren Lucre. Because if the boy ends up with even half his mother’s intelligence and ability, that will be the name of the hunter who finally puts you out of your misery. Do you hear me, Ren Lucre? Jack Templar. That’s the name you ought to fear.”
He fell to the ground, exhausted, weakened by both the wound in his side and the breaking of his heart. He closed his eyes to the world, wishing that somehow this was all some terrible nightmare from which he could wake. But he knew that was not to be. This was something he had to live through, holding out hope that his words would one day come true and he name Jack Templar would be a name every wretched Creach would learn to fear.
All he could do until that day was hope for the best for his son, and mourn not only the passing of his wife but all the brave hunters that had led the attack on the castle walls.
He refused to believe the sacrifice of so many lives had all been for nothing. His son lived. Jack lived. And so long as that was true, there was still a chance Ren Lucre could be stopped.
As his Creach captors dragged him deeper and deeper into the dungeons under the castle, John hoped and prayed that when the time came, Jack would find the strength to finish what his parents had started. Only time would tell. One way or the other, he felt certain he would meet his grown son one day. He was already impatient for the reunion, if only for the chance to look into the boy’s eyes and see Angelica looking back at him.
No matter what they did to him, that possibility made the wait worthwhile.
1
I didn’t have a good feeling about what I was about to do. Since the day Eva showed up in Sunnyvale with the news that I was a monster hunter and that every monster in the world was out to kill me, I’d developed a pretty good sense of when things were off. Maybe walking into so many messed up situations during that time had made me more sensitive to small signs. You’d think I’d have gotten smarter by now, but the fact that I was about to climb out of my hiding spot and break into the witch’s house, on my own, clearly showed that I was as dumb as when I’d started this adventure.
At least that’s what Eva liked to tell me. Her internal filter had only gotten worse since I let the Lord of the Vampires turn her into one of the undead, ironically as a way to save her life. Never one to pull any punches, she said whatever came to her mind, regardless of how it sounded.
Take yesterday, when our team of five monster hunters ducked into a bar
n during a thunderstorm, Eva sat on the bale of hay closest to the door, rubbing her vampire teeth with her fingers. “This place stinks worse than you do.”
My face went hot, so I covered up by digging through my backpack to find my last protein bar. The rest of the guys jostled for seats on the hay bales, looking for the most comfortable spot. It was going to be a long wait, so everyone, except for me, found something to pass the time.
Between the flashes and booms of the storm raging outside, I thought through my plan to collect the Jerusalem Stone I’d left with the witch, Bella of the Woods. Not by choice. She would have killed Xavier otherwise. Anyway, I needed to leave the Stone somewhere safe before we went to the Underworld to steal the one held by Shaitan, the Lord of the Demons. When I explained my plan to go to the witch’s house alone, it was met with more than a little resistance from the others.
“That’s a ridiculous idea,” Eva said. She was eyeing a mouse in the corner of the barn. I had the unsettling feeling she was thinking about eating it.
“It’s the easiest way to get it back,” I said.
She turned from the mouse and stared at me, unblinking. “You’re dumb and selfish. You’ll end up being boiled alive in one of the witch’s cauldrons.”
The rest of my friends weren’t exactly fans of the idea either.
T-Rex and Will, my two buddies from home who’d followed me into this mess, tried their best to talk me out of it, using all kinds of guilt trips. Will was hard-core about it, calling me both a moron and a loser, but I could tell by T-Rex’s tone that he could do without a return trip to the witch’s cottage and her herd of weird little henchmen, the Talib. “Don’t go alone. I couldn’t stand it if we found one of those Talib heads stitched onto your body, running around trying to fight us.”