Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5)

by Nassise, Joseph

  In many of the rooms he felt the fleeting presence of the dead, both ancient and modern. He caught a glimpse of them from time to time, will-o-the-wisps of shadow that shifted about in the corners of rooms he passed or slipped around the corner just ahead, gone again when he reached that place. A few times he passed a room where something darker lay slumbering and he made sure to hurry past without disturbing whatever it was.

  By the time he reached the exit at the far end of the structure and stepped out into the courtyard leading to the church, Cade was more than happy to leave the building behind.

  The entrance to the church lay just ahead and he walked over to it without hesitation. He found the door unlocked when he tugged on it and he slipped inside. Finding the narrow entrance to the clock tower stairwell, he headed up them at a brisk pace, knowing that what he’d come here for was close at hand and getting closer by the minute.

  As he neared the top he could see a faint silvery light shining down the steps from the doorway above.

  It looked a lot like moonlight to him.

  He’d seen the bricked-up windows on his approach to the island and that made him pause. Those he’d seen looked intact, but he supposed one or another could have fallen victim to the weather or shoddy craftsmanship and was allowing some of the light to filter in from outside.

  Or that light was something else entirely.

  Only one way to find out.

  Cade made his way up the last few remaining steps and looked into the room just beyond from the darkness of the stairwell landing.

  What he saw made him nearly gasp in surprise.

  The bricked-up windows had been nothing more than illusion. Moonlight streamed in through their open faces, illuminating a tall individual in a dark hooded robe standing before an easel on the far side of the room painting with the help of that very light. From where he stood, Cade had a decent look at the image on the stranger’s canvas and he felt his blood run cold when he realized that it was a portrait of his own face.

  The painter spoke up without looking away from his canvas.

  “So like a Templar, always skulking in the shadows.”

  The comment, and the tone, irritated Cade, but he reminded himself to keep cool as he stepped out into the light.This thing, whatever it truly was, had decimated squads of Templars without even trying. Cade was good, but not good enough to take it on by himself and win. He needed to manage this with a little bit of finesse.

  “You know who I am.” He made the statement a fact, rather than a question.

  That hooded head turned in his direction, but the shadows made it impossible for Cade to see inside of it. The voice sounded human enough, but he knew that was no guarantee of anything.

  “Sniper and decorated police officer. Templar Knight Commander. Husband. Sworn adversary of the angel Asharael.” There was a hint of amusement in its tone now. “Oh yes, I know all about you, Cade Williams.”

  “If you know me, then you know why I have come.”

  The painter didn’t bother to look up from its canvas.

  “You don’t have it in you to do what must be done. Leave this place and let events fall where they may.”

  Cade shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Won’t.”

  Cade stepped into the room, doing what he could to dispel the growing sense of unease he was feeling in the stranger’s presence, and glanced around as he did so. Paintings and sketches of all shapes and sizes lined the walls and Cade was horrified to see that each and every one of them featured either himself or his wife, Gabrielle. A painting of Cade fighting zombies lurching up from the water amidst a submerged Louisiana swamp stood beside a sketch of Gabrielle as a Ferryman at the prow of a skiff on the Sea of Lamentations. A charcoal rub of the angel Baraquel looming over Riley and Cade in the Eden facility partially concealed a study of Gabrielle as she appeared in the Brooklyn warehouse just a few weeks earlier. Each image was a scene lifted right out of the events of their lives the past few years.

  Cade slowly turned in place, taking it all in, and he felt his calm reason slowly being replaced by anger. This thing, whatever it was, had not just been watching events play out on the world stage, as the Seneschal’s journal had indicated, but it had specifically been observing Gabrielle and him.

  For quite literally years.

  “Why are you watching me? Watching us?”

  It came out a little harsher than he expected, but that couldn’t be helped. Cade had never expected to find that the Watcher he’d come to confront would be involved in watching him!

  He whirled around, pinning the Forsaken One with his gaze. “What the hell is going on here?!”

  The painter ignored him, dabbing more paint on the canvass in front of him.

  Cade didn’t like the connections he was drawing in his mind. The Forsaken One knew of his wife’s situation, knew of the feud, for lack of better words, between him and the Adversary, knew even of the abilities that he had kept hidden from all but a chosen few. All that knowledge no doubt meant that he knew as much about the Adversary as well. In this he had all but told Cade to go home, that there was nothing that he could say or do that would help Cade in his quest to free Gabrielle.

  Cade didn’t believe that.

  Couldn’t believe that.

  And the Forsaken One’s unwillingness to cooperate was starting to piss him off.

  In that moment his anger got the better of him.

  “You will speak to me, demon!” Cade shouted, his hand going to the hilt of his sword.

  That hooded face turned and looked at him, freezing him with a glance. Cade tried to move his hand, tried to draw the sword within his grasp in order to protect himself from the creature’s wrath, only to find his arm frozen in place.

  His fear jumped up several notches at a go.

  How do you fight a creature with power like that?

  The Forsaken One stared at him a moment.

  “Is that what you think I am? A demon?”

  The laugh that followed was bitter and dark, made all the more unnerving as it issued from that hidden face.

  “I am amazed that you have lived so long knowing so little of the things you hunt, Templar. I could destroy you, here and now, with just a glance and yet you insult me with names and threaten me with your puny excuse for a weapon. Are you really so blind?”

  “If I am blind, enlighten me,” Cade replied, unable to do anything else. “Prove to me that you are not what I say.”

  For a moment, Cade didn’t think it – he? – was going to reply. The Forsaken One added another few strokes to its masterpiece, seemingly indifferent to what Cade said, and Cade had a momentary vision of being stuck in this room forever, trapped with one hand reaching for his weapon, while the bastard in front of him dabbed at its canvas with its brightly colored paints.

  When the explosion came, it caught Cade entirely off guard. The palette of paints was flung across the room while the Forsaken One used the brush in its hand like a knife, slashing the canvas into ragged strips with lightning fast movements. One minute it was on the other side of the room, the next the Forsaken One was looming over him with a furious expression on his face.

  “Prove to you?” it yelled and it seemed the very walls of the tower around them shook with the sound. “By what measure should I have to prove anything to you?”

  The creature’s anger seemed to have caused it to lose its hold on him, for Cade found that he could move once more. But there was nowhere for him to go and he knew that if he dared to try and draw his weapon the thing looming over him would more than likely strike him down before he managed to get even a single inch of his blade free of its sheath. So instead he stood perfectly still, staring up into the square-jawed masculine face that he could now see inside the hood; a face that was human and yet not, a face that was perfectly proportioned in every way, so much so that it appeared almost alien in its
perfection, and braced himself for what was to come.

  “I was old before time began, before your ragged race took their first step on this waste of a Creation, and I will be here long after you and your kind are gone!

  “I have soared over the Deep and stood shoulder to shoulder with my brethren as the rebellion caught fire and set the world alight!”

  With each declaration the Forsaken One seemed to grow taller, larger. His voice gained power, too, until it was thundering in the enclosed space.

  “I claim Michael, Gabriel, and Rapheal as my brothers; Raguel, Remiel and Saraquel as my sisters!

  “I am the watcher in the dark, the chronicler of the ages, the beacon of light in the sea of confusion. I am the savior of prophets, the keeper of the truth, and the slayer of the chosen!

  “I am Uriel, the Forsaken One!”

  With that final declaration, he reached up and tore his robe to the waist, revealing himself to Cade.

  He had dark hair and dark eyes to go with that symmetrical face, plus a body honed and hardened by years of conflict and training. His skin was the color of burnt sienna, but Cade almost didn’t notice because his attention was entirely captured by the tattoos that covered every square inch of exposed flesh that he could see; from the base of Uriel’s neck down to his stomach and continuing lower beneath his robe it looked like.

  The tattoos twisted and moved and roamed about on his flesh like living breathing creations with a life all their own. Images rose to prominence as a scene played out Cade’s eyes and then fell into the background again as another took its place. Each of them were different than the one before and it didn’t take long for Cade to realize that he was watching events from the past, present, and quite possibly the future play out in an endless sequence on Uriel’s flesh.

  Entranced, Cade reached out with one hand, only to draw it back before touching the other man when he realized what he was about to do. The sheer artistry of it all was enthralling, even when the scenes of light and beauty shifted to those of horror and war and suffering. Cade found himself slowly following the images as they moved from Uriel’s chest to his side and around to his back...

  Then Cade stopped short.

  The shocking ruin of Uriel’s back told another story entirely.

  Two ragged clumps of tissue rose a few inches above the point where a human’s shoulder blades would be, all that remained of his once majestic wings, and those clumps still oozed black rivulets of blood that meandered down the angel’s lower back in tiny rivers of pain. The flesh surrounding the stubs was laced with old scars that marked where the blade had hacked and sliced at his flesh and Cade nearly recoiled in horror and empathy at the sight.

  But there was a story here as well, in the ruin of that once glorious form, a story that Cade instinctively knew that he was supposed to witness, to see, and so he continued his circle around the angel until he returned to the place where he had started.

  “And now, perhaps, you understand,” Uriel said quietly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Uriel the archangel.

  He is mentioned several times in the Christian Apocrypha, particularly the books of Enoch and Esdras, as one of the seven hosts who guarded the throne of heaven. Tradition held that he was the angel that had checked the doors of the Jews for lamb’s blood during the Passover plague in Egypt and the one that carried John the Baptist and his mother, Elizabeth, to join the holy family after their flight out of Egypt. Uriel was noted as being as pitiless as a demon in the Apocalypse of Peter, another extra-biblical text, and in the Life of Adam and Eve he is listed as the angel that helped to bury both Adam and Abel in Paradise.

  Perhaps more importantly, given Cade’s current needs, Uriel was historically regarded as the angel of wisdom, the one who shines the light of God’s truth into the darkness. All that he had seen, all that he had witnessed, both the sublime and the horrendous, had been recorded on his flesh and transformed into a living collection of knowledge. It was from that collection that the angel drew the endless supply of wisdom that the angel was traditionally believed to dispense.

  But Uriel was not the angel he had once been, that was clear. An angel’s power rested in his wings and Uriel had been stripped of those, either purposely or through an injury. As a result he had been reduced from a being of almost limitless power to something much less. He was still vastly more powerful than Cade, as he had so aptly illustrated already, but he was far from what he had once been.

  All this flashed through Cade’s mind in an instant and he realized that he did, in fact, understand.

  At some point in the distant past, Uriel had retreated from the fight. He’d left the battle between good and evil to those still equipped to carry it forth and had retreated into the shadows, to bear witness and record the conflict for future generations.

  But what got Cade excited was the understanding that Uriel was a senior member of the heavenly host and by his own admission had been around since before the Fall. He had called the Adversary by name, which meant he had most likely known the fallen angel personally. There probably wasn’t anyone else on the planet – aside from the Adversary himself – who could tell Cade what he needed to know to rescue his wife.

  And you’ve gone and pissed Uriel off.

  Nice job, Williams.

  Cade bowed his head briefly in a gesture of respect and then looked up again, meeting the angel’s stare.

  “My apologies; I meant no disrespect. Perhaps we could start over?”

  Uriel sighed and turned away, walking over to the nearest window to stare out into the night. Over his shoulder, he said, “You cannot save Gabrielle; you can only set her free.”

  Set her free?

  Cade didn’t like the sound of that.

  “What does that mean?” he asked, a bit more harshly than he intended as his heart rate kicked up.

  Get a grip, man.

  Uriel either didn’t notice or chose to ignore his tone.

  “Asharael began altering your wife’s body the moment he took control of it, bending and morphing it to his will. That kind of physical change comes at a terrible price. It is only his presence within her flesh that is keeping the damage he has caused from crippling her or killing her outright. He can keep her body alive indefinitely in this fashion. If you remove that protection, however...”

  Cade stared at him, unhappy with what he was hearing.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said, pointing a finger in Uriel’s direction, “you’re telling me that if I succeed in freeing Gabrielle from the Adversary’s control, she’ll die?”

  Uriel nodded. “Yes. Probably within seconds and in a very grisly fashion.”

  Cade shook his head. “No. No, that can’t be right. There has to be a way!”

  “Believe me when I tell you that there is not.”

  All the fear and pain and despair that he’d been harboring for the last few weeks came pouring up from deep inside and Cade suddenly lost it. Within moments he was hollering at the angel standing in front of him.

  “Fuck you!” he yelled as he paced back and forth in front of Uriel. “Just fuck you! What the hell do you know, anyway? You’re just some sorry sack of shit with his wings ripped off! I know there’s a way; there has to be!”

  Uriel didn’t say anything; he just stood there and calmly watched Cade pace back and forth while shaking his fist in the angel’s direction.

  “No, you’re wrong. You have to be wrong. There’s no way I’m letting that bastard do this. No fucking way!”

  “You have to.”

  The declaration brought Cade up short. He spun around to face the crippled angel, anger on his face.

  “What did you just say?”

  Uriel met his gaze calmly. “You have to let Asharael win. He must remain in possession of your wife’s body.”

  “Like hell he will!”

  Cade was quickly becoming convinced that this was a complete waste of time. Urie
l had clearly spent too much time locked away from the world in this tower to know what needed to be done. Cade had to get out of here, get back to the mainland, and from there he could...

  “This is not a question of choice,” Uriel said to him, capturing Cade’s attention with the hard, relentless tone in his voice. “You let the Adversary escape twice before but you cannot do so a third time. He has been preparing to return his entire scream of angels to this plane and if that happens – if he is united with his former allies – there will be no end to the suffering they will cause.”

  It took everything Cade had not to laugh. “You don’t seem to get it,” he said. “The world can go to hell for all I care. I’m done with trying to do the right thing. All I want to do is rescue my wife; she’s been suffering at that bastard’s hands long enough!”

  Uriel stepped closer. “No,” he said, with a tang of steel in his voice, “it is you who do not seem to get it.”

  Without warning, he reached out and grabbed Cade’s arm.

  One moment Cade was standing in the clock tower arguing with the injured angel, the next the two of them were standing on an ash-strewn plain staring out at the remains of a bombed-out city in the distance. Most of the buildings had been reduced to nothing more than piles of rubble, but a single tower with a large clock on it rose defiantly through the twisting, churning smoke that seemed to be drifting everywhere. Something about the tower looked familiar, but it took Cade several minutes of staring at it before he recognized it as Big Ben.

  If that is Big Ben, he thought, that meant the city he was looking at, the one that looked more like an apocalyptic wasteland than a city, was London.

  Cade gazed around in disbelief.

  What the hell had happened here?

  Before he could ask, his attention was drawn to a ragtag group of survivors making their way across the plain before them. They were picking their way through the rubble, occasionally glancing upward into the haze-filled sky above. Cade counted two men, three women, and a small child. He turned a questioning look in Uriel’s direction, but the angel kept watching the tableau before them and Cade turned back to do the same.