A Tear in the Sky - 03

by Joseph Nassise

  A TEAR IN THE SKY

  Joseph Nassise

  CHAPTER ONE

  The priest ran toward the altar as if hell itself followed on his heels.

  He didn’t have much time, minutes at best. Still, that might be enough. The others would have a warning at least. It was the best he could do, given the circumstances.

  Racing up the steps, he crossed to the tabernacle and spun the dials on the lock with trembling fingers. He set the second one incorrectly and had to do it again, losing precious seconds in the process. Opening the tabernacle, he bent one knee, genuflected, and then removed the ciborium from inside the blessed chamber.

  From the other end of the church he could hear them banging on the inside of the sacristy door. He’d locked it behind him, but he didn’t expect it to hold them for long.

  Opening the ciborium and removing one of the communion wafers, he begged for Christ’s forgiveness for his sins and then placed the wafer on his tongue. From years past the voice of Father Jerome, his old seminary professor, came to him.

  “Viaticum, from the Latin ’via tecum’, meaning ’provisions for the journey.’ The final rite in the sacrament of Extreme Unction, the giving of the Eucharist ensures that the dying do not die alone, but have Christ with them in their final moments just as He has been with them in life.”

  Behind him, the door to the sacristy burst from its hinges and the howls of his pursuers filled the nave.

  He was out of time.

  Steeling himself for what he knew was to come, he calmly closed the tabernacle and spun the dials, locking it against intrusion. It wouldn’t hold out a determined thief, but he had done his part and could rest easy on that score. He got to his feet and turned to face the front of the church.

  The shadows had reached the transept.

  He hurried to the altar and took up the Bible resting there. It wouldn’t hold them off but he felt better with it in his hands.

  As they reached the foot of the altar, he calmly went down to meet them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Knight Commander Cade Williams stalked down the hallway of the Bennington Containment Facility, angry at himself for being there yet knowing that he really had no choice in the matter.

  Just hours before a request had been relayed to him by the facility’s warden. The request had originated from the prison’s most high-profile prisoner, Simon Logan, the Necromancer, a man who had used the arcane power in the Spear of Longinus to try to destroy the Order itself.

  He would have succeeded, too, if it hadn’t been for Cade and the men of the Echo Team.

  Logan had apparently asked to see Cade. Said it was urgent even. But it was the note that accompanied the request that had captured his attention.

  Just eight simple words.

  I have a message from your wife, Gabrielle.

  Anything else the Necromancer might have said would have been ignored outright. After turning Logan over to those who ran the facility, Cade’s interest in the former head of the Council of Nine had vanished. He had other, more pertinent things to worry about than the fate of a man who had tried to take on the Order and lost.

  But if Logan had actually received a message from Cade’s long dead wife, Gabrielle, then that was something Cade couldn’t simply ignore. As a necromancer, Logan certainly had an affinity for the dead, which made the possibility that he’d spoken to Gabrielle a realistic one.

  Cade knew his wife’s spirit was not at rest. He’d encountered her shade several times over the last few months and it was Gabrielle herself who had convinced Cade not to slay Logan outright when he’d been at Cade’s mercy following the assault on the Council’s stronghold. Why she might have relayed a message through the Necromancer rather than simply coming to see him herself was what he didn’t understand and that lack of understanding was what had driven him to agree to the visit.

  He reached the guard station at the end of the hall. There he surrendered his side arm, watch, and the contents of his pockets. The black feather he wore on a piece of leather about his neck was glanced at curiously when he laid it down with the rest of his items, but no one made any comment. One of the guards requested that Cade remove his gloves, but the senior officer stepped in and informed the guard that that wouldn’t be necessary.

  Which was good because Cade wouldn’t have agreed to the request anyway. His gloves stayed on, no matter where he went. He wouldn’t have objected to giving up the eye patch that covered the ruin of his right eye, but they didn’t ask.

  He waited with the senior officer for the junior one to buzz them through the gate and then the two men moved down the end of the hall and through a series of three more barriers until they came to the room outside the Necromancer’s cell.

  Cade was a member of the Holy Order of the Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of Solomon, or the Knights Templar, as they were once more commonly known. Long thought to have been destroyed in the fourteenth century, the Templars had emerged from hiding during the desperate days of World War II and had joined with the very entity that had excommunicated them en-masse so many centuries before, the Catholic Church. Reborn as a secret military arm of the Vatican, the Templars were now charged with defending mankind from the supernatural in all its forms.

  As the commander of the Echo Team, the most prestigious of the elite strike units fielded by the Templars, Cade was known for both his ruthless efficiency and his often unorthodox methods.

  The two men guarding the Necromancer recognized him by sight, despite the fact that he’d never been down to this part of the maximum security level before, and were already opening up the doors to the room beyond as he stepped up to the guard station.

  The man who’d escorted him turned to face him. “Rule #1: Nothing goes in that doesn’t come out. Rule #2: No physical contact with the prisoner. And Rule #3: If you need help, just yell and we’ll come running. Got it?”

  Cade nodded and then stepped through the door.

  The room was large, about twelve feet to a side, and in its center stood a cage of iron. The cage had been home to Simon Logan, the man known as the Necromancer, ever since Cade had defeated him in battle several months ago. It was furnished with a bed, a toilet, and a small writing desk, nothing more.

  Inside the cage waiting for him was the Necromancer.

  Logan was a shadow of his former self. He’d lost considerable weight, his features sinking into the ruin of his face like a pumpkin past its prime, his bones poking awkwardly against the confines of his jumpsuit. He was in constant movement, shuffling back and forth across the small space of his cell, eight steps across and then eight steps back, over and over again, like a man hunted by something he couldn’t see nor understand.

  His first words to Cade seemed to reinforce that viewpoint.

  “The dead torment me.”

  His voice was a reedy whisper, so different from the bold commands he’d shouted at his followers before his defeat.

  Cade had no sympathy for him. “As well they should,” he replied. Logan had thought nothing of dragging the souls of the dead back across the barrier between the land of the dead and that of the living and forcing them to reanimate their decomposed and corrupted bodies. For him to be haunted by those he’d treated in such a fashion was nothing but justice itself and Cade told him so.

  Logan went on as if he hadn’t heard.

  “They torment me. Especially her.”

  Cade’s pulse quickened.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “You know who.”

  Cade crossed the room to stand in front of Logan. For all he knew Logan was running an elaborate con and so Cade refused to give him anything. “No, I don’t,” he said, “tell me.”

  Logan’s resp
onse, when it came, surprised him.

  “She said you wouldn’t believe me, so she said to give you this.”

  As Logan reached inside the pocket of his prison uniform, Cade automatically braced for an attack, expecting him to pull out a shiv or some other makeshift weapon he’d fashioned without the guards’ knowledge. But Logan’s hand emerged from the interior of his clothing with only a pewter medallion that dangled from a silver chain.

  Logan tossed the necklace through the bars at Cade.

  Wary of arcane trickery, Cade refused to catch it, stepping back and letting it fall to the floor at his feet.

  A glance downward told him it was a Saint Christopher medallion, the kind a lot of cops carried around, Christopher being the patron saint of policemen and lost causes.

  This particular medal had a dent in it, right in the center where the face of the saint had once been, a dent large enough that it obliterated the saint’s entire image, leaving just the caption running around the outside of the disk.

  Seeing it, Cade froze.

  He recognized that dent. Remembered the night that medallion had deflected a bullet that should have take his head off like it was yesterday, how that tiny piece of medal had saved his life and consequently the life of his partner as well. They’d been pinned down in a shadowy corridor inside a Southie tenement house and had never even seen their assailant until that shot had come blazing out of the darkness. Saint Christopher had saved his life, there was no question of that, and he’d worn that medallion night and day for years afterwards in a superstitious show of faith.

  Cade’s heart beat wildly. A hand reached out in front of him and it took him a moment to realize it was his own. He picked the medallion up and turned it over, knowing even before he did so what he would see.

  The inscription read: “Every day after this is a gift. Use them well.”

  He’d put it there, the day after the shooting, to remind him just how fragile and transitory life actually was. He’d never taken the medallion off, not until that horrible summer day seven years ago.

  Cade’s fist clenched around the medallion.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked, his voice as cold as winter snow.

  But Logan didn’t even flinch. He simply stared at Cade with those eyes that had seen too much and said, “She said you’d suspect that I’d taken it from her grave, so she gave me a message for you.”

  Cade visibly started. It was as if Logan were reading his mind. He had been thinking that Logan, or at least one of his cronies, had disturbed Gabrielle’s rest and he was ready to tear the man limb from limb for doing so.

  “One day at a time. She told me to tell you one day at a time.”

  A wave of dizziness washed over him at the implications of what Logan was saying. Seven years ago he’d put that same Saint Christopher medallion in his wife’s hand just before the funeral director had closed the casket over her still and silent form. Call it superstitious, but he’d wanted her to have some extra protection in the next life, considering how horribly this one had ended for her. He vividly remembered leaning down to kiss her cold cheek and whispering to her, asking her how he was going to survive without her.

  She’d apparently decided to finally answer his question.

  Cade stayed lost in thought for several long moments. At last he looked up and met Logan’s eager gaze. “I’m listening,” he said.

  Logan seemed to gain some of his old confidence back at Cade’s reaction. He stepped away from the bars, went back to pacing back and forth across the space of his cell. “I have some requests,” he began, but Cade cut him off.

  “I don’t have time to play games, Logan. Get to the point.”

  The Necromancer turned to face him.

  “Sunlight.”

  “I’m sorry?” The comment was so unexpected that Cade had trouble following the other man’s train of thought.

  “Sunlight. I want to see sunlight again, before the end of my trial.”

  Cade didn’t have to even think about it. He knew the prisoner was going to be transferred from Bennington to Longfort at the end of the month and doing so would require him to travel in an armored transport vehicle. The transport had windows. Provided it didn’t rain on the day he made the trip, Cade knew he could persuade the warden to forget the blindfold and let the prisoner have one last look at the sunlight, though why Logan would want it was beyond Cade’s ability to fathom. No matter. He’d put a window in Logan’s personal cell if that was what it would take to get the information he needed out of him, orders to the contrary be damned.

  “Done,” Cade replied. “Sunlight. Before the end of your trial.”

  Logan grinned slyly, but Cade pretended not to see it. “Now,” he said instead, “tell me what she said.”

  Logan explained that Gabrielle’s shade was visiting him every night, tormenting him, refusing to let him sleep. “She just keeps repeating the same refrain, over and over again, her voice like an ice pick in my mind.” He closed his eyes, as if he wanted to avoid any distractions and get it right.

  “The Lady in the Tower sleeps beneath the banner of night on the island of lost dreams, but her sleep is not restful and she can find no peace.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I would think it would be obvious, Commander.”

  “So wow me with your superior knowledge.”

  “Your wife is not dead, simply a captive of the Adversary.”

  Cade stood there, stunned.

  It was perhaps the last thing he’d ever expected to hear. And yet, somehow, he suspected that the Necromancer was right.

  Gabrielle? Alive?

  That put a whole new perspective on things.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Cade spent the next three days wrestling with his thoughts, trying to come to grips with the doubts that had arisen in the aftermath of his conversation with the Necromancer. They had burrowed deep within the heart of him, their questing tendrils seeking out the soft places of his soul and anchoring there like some kind of cancerous mass, growing roots, oozing outward unchecked, until they were so large that ignoring them was no longer even an option. Not knowing would eat him alive, would consume him from the inside out. There was no other choice; he would have to see for himself.

  For that, he was going to need some help.

  Later that afternoon he knocked on the door to Riley’s quarters in the senior noncoms housing unit. “I could use your help,” Cade said to him without preamble when Riley opened the door.

  The other man shrugged. “Sure. Anything you need.”

  “You might want to hear me out first,” said Cade and something in his voice made Riley do just that.

  Cade had his personal vehicle there at the commandery and so the two of them took a leisurely afternoon drive, wandering the back roads as Cade laid out the problem and exactly what he intended to do.

  Riley was silent as Cade talked, letting him get it all out without interruption, but when he was finished Riley didn’t hold anything back.

  “You know Logan’s a lying son-of-a-bitch, don’t you? That he’s probably telling you all this just to mess with your head?”

  Cade nodded. “That was my first reaction. But what if he’s not?”

  “What do you mean ’what if he’s not’? Of course he is! He’s the freakin’ Necromancer. Lying is all that he does.”

  “Maybe. And maybe not. But I can’t take that chance. If there is even the slightest possibility that some part of what he told me is the truth, then I need to find out. And there is only one way of doing that.”

  Riley shook his head. “What you’re proposing is nuts. It’s public property and the cops are always cruising by the place. You wouldn’t last twenty minutes.”

  Cade shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t have any choice. I’ve got to try and see for myself. I’m going nuts second guessing it all.”

  Riley didn’t reply.

  They continued driving in silence for a time, each
of them lost in their own thoughts. The December landscape unfolded around them, empty fields and stark, barren trees that reached outward with skeletal branches, the road winding up and down, around this hill and over that, headed everywhere and nowhere. Cade knew the idea was risky, and he had no desire to try explaining everything to the police should they be caught, but he was willing to take that chance. The only issue was whether his friend was willing to go along with it.

  After a long while, Cade spoke up. “So, are you in or not?”

  Riley looked over at him. “Of course I’m in.”

  And at that, Cade just had to smile.

  ** *** ***

  It was a simple headstone, plain grey New Hampshire granite, its front polished to a glistening shine so that the words carved into its face contrasted sharply with the smooth surface. Unlike the other stones around it, this one did not contain a name. Nor was there the usual assemblage of dates. Cade had not seen the need for them; he knew who rested here, knew when she had been born and the awful day that she’d died. He didn’t need a set of dates to remind him of those times. He’d known that he’d be the only one returning here after the funeral was over and he’d chosen to leave them off the marker. In their place he had selected a line from Dickens that seemed particularly appropriate to him during those dark summer days immediately following Gabrielle’s death.

  It is a far, far better rest I go to,

  than I have ever known

  Now, looking at those words in the pale light from his flashlight, he was struck with an overwhelming sense of bitterness. What foolish arrogance had made him choose that quote over some other? Rest was certainly the last thing she had received and he suspected that it was all his fault.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Riley asked. Cade knew it was his friend’s way of giving him one last chance to think about the potential consequences, but he’d already made up his mind. He had to know. It was as simple as that.

  In answer to Riley’s question, Cade picked up his shovel, drove it deep into the earth in front of the headstone, and began digging.