Fall of Night: A Templar Chronicles Novel

by Joseph Nassise

  Green had fallen unconscious from the strain of the examination and Ferguson left him there, sprawled in the chair, while he pondered what to do with the information he viewed.

  Captain Riley's suspicions were growing and that wasn’t good. He had the potential of becoming a greater problem than Ferguson anticipated. Perhaps not as vexing as Knight Commander Williams had been, but certainly dangerous enough to cause problems in the days ahead if he wasn’t dealt with expeditiously. It was time for Ferguson to put the next phase of his plan into motion; he’d delayed long enough.

  Ferguson summoned his aide and directed him to take Green back to his quarters, then headed down the hall in search of the Preceptor.

  He found Johannson right where he expected him to be, in his office reviewing the actions planned for the day ahead. After being admitted to the room by the guards outside – several more than had been there the day before, Ferguson noted with distain – he waited until the other man looked up before saying, “A moment of your time, if I may, Preceptor?”

  “Of course, Seneschal,” Johannson replied. “Please come in.”

  Johannson came out from behind his desk as the Seneschal closed the door and crossed the room, and the two men took seats facing each other in the arm chairs arranged before the fireplace.

  “What can I do for you?” Johannson asked eagerly.

  The man wears his ambitions on his sleeve, Ferguson thought with distaste, but managed to squelch his irritation before it showed. Better to know what the man was thinking than have him plotting behind your back, he told himself. Besides, ambitious men have their uses.

  Like now.

  He put an earnest look on his face. “What we’re about to discuss concerns the future of the Order and cannot be repeated outside these walls, do you understand?”

  Johannson nodded. “Completely, Seneschal. You have my complete discretion.”

  Ferguson stared at him, seemingly weighing whether he believed him or not but in truth just playing to the man’s sense of drama, and then went on. “I must admit to growing concerned of late with the incidents the Order has been involved with. First there was that business with the Necromancer and the theft of the Spear from the reliquary. Then the death of Preceptor Michaels. No sooner had that been dealt with that Knight Commander Williams drags us into an unwanted and unnecessary war with the Chiang Shih, followed by all the problems with the Adversary. One issue after another, none of which we were properly prepared for.”

  The Preceptor started to speak, but Ferguson cut him off.

  “I wouldn’t say this in other company, but I think the situation is clear. We’ve been living in the old world too long. Rather than waiting for the enemy to show its face, we need to be proactive in taking the fight to them. It’s time we modernized how we operate. To do that we need new leadership at the helm if we’re going to right this ship before it sinks completely.”

  The Seneschal could practically see the wheels turning inside Johannson’s head as he tried to figure all the angles. He let him work it all out, already knowing what the man must be thinking.

  Johannson did not disappoint.

  “I agree completely, Seneschal. I will support your candidacy for Grand Master whenever you say the word.”

  Ferguson laughed.

  “No, you misunderstand me, my good man. I have no intention of stepping into the role of Grand Master. I’m quite content right where I am.”

  He watched Johannson’s eyes grow almost comically wide as he figured out the implications of what Ferguson had just said.

  “You’re not suggesting…”

  “I am, indeed!” Ferguson exclaimed. “You’re the obvious replacement. You are already running things quite aptly here in the United States and I see no reason those skills can’t be put to the right use on a global scale.”

  “Grand Master Devereaux-“

  “Is in poor health and I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if his end comes much sooner than either of us anticipate,” Ferguson replied. “You will have my complete support when the time arrives, which, I must confess, I hope is sooner rather than later for the good of the Order. Do you understand?”

  The sharp glint of ambition was easy to see in the Preceptor’s eyes as he nodded. “I understand completely, Seneschal.”

  Ferguson wanted to laugh; it was almost too absurdly easy.

  It was time for a new Order to rise, one with a very different agenda.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Two days after the team meeting Riley was in the field with a bunch of new recruits in the late afternoon working on escape and evasion techniques when his phone rang.

  “Riley.”

  “It’s Gant. You need to get out.”

  Gant commanded Charlie Team, one of the other six special combat units in the Templar hierarchy, and Riley had known him for more than a decade. In all that time, he’d never heard him sound as scared as he sounded right now.

  “Get out? What do you mean?”

  Gant’s next words chilled Riley to the bone.

  “Grand Master Devereaux is dead. Preceptor Johannson has seized control of the Order, backed by the Seneschal. Warrants have already been issued for all of the team commanders. Word is Tyler tried to argue with those the Preceptor sent to arrest him and was gunned down for resisting!”

  Riley was stunned into silence.

  Tyler gunned down?

  It sounded crazy. As a longtime veteran, never mind the commander of Beta Team, his loyalty to the Order should have been unquestionable and yet he’d just been killed by the very men he trusted most.

  It was almost too much to believe.

  And yet it was everything Riley feared would happen.

  The sound of Gant shouting something to one of his own men shook Riley out of his daze.

  “Gant, listen to me. I’m initiating Code Black. I repeat, Code Black.”

  “Understood,” Gant said, “Code Black.” He hesitated a moment, and then said, “Good luck, Captain,” before breaking the connection.

  Good luck, indeed, Riley thought.

  Code Black was an emergency protocol put in place several years earlier when Knight Commander Williams was in charge of the special ops teams. It was designed as a fallback to protect elements of the Order in the wake of an all-out attack on the Order. Cade had been thinking of external threats, like those once posed by the Chiang Shih; no one, especially not Riley, had ever expected it to be invoked to protect them from their fellow knights.

  Knowledge of the protocol was restricted to the special ops team commanders and their executive officers. Cade had purposely set it up that way and now Riley was very thankful he had. The way things were going, it was going to get increasingly harder to trust anyone outside that inner circle.

  Upon receipt of the Code Black order, the team commanders were to immediately scatter to the four winds, taking their units with them. Caches of weapons, ammunition, and other supplies had been secreted at various locations and each team was assigned to a different cache. Their orders were to resupply from their assigned caches, secure the rest, and then rendezvous with the other teams in the warehouse of an abandoned granite quarry north of Fairfield two days later. If that position was compromised, they were to wait an additional twenty-four hours and then try again at a secondary location, a safe house set up in Stratford, an old mill town northeast of the Ravensgate commandery.

  Working to keep his reaction to the news off his face, Riley turned command of the exercise over to one of the lieutenants nearby and excused himself, hurrying over to the SUV he’d checked out of the motor pool earlier that morning. He was thankful he’d loaded his personal gear into the back before leaving, as that meant he had no reason to return to the commandery. Not that he’d have taken the risk; from what Gant had said, doing so would be tantamount to suicide.

  Once inside the vehicle behind the tinted windows, he pulled out his cell phone and sent a group text to the team commanders and their executi
ve officers. The text was a single word in all capital letters.

  BLACK.

  They would all know what it meant.

  He just hoped he’d gotten the word out in time.

  The cache he was assigned to lay in the hollowed out shell of an old freezer buried two feet below the surface of the ground next to converted barn Cade had made into a workroom. It was a forty-five-minute drive from where he was, which meant he’d be arriving in the waning light of late afternoon.

  Good, he thought. Cade’s house is pretty remote, but the less chance of being seen, the better.

  He put the car in drive and got out of there without a backward glance.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Gabrielle never made it to Boston.

  The closer she got, the more she became convinced that Boston wasn’t the destination she was seeking. By the time she crossed the Connecticut border every fiber of her being seemed to be pointing her toward a little town called Willow Grove.

  Since she’d come this far on little more than a whisper and a prayer, she needed to pay attention to her instincts.

  The house was set back away from the road, barely visible through the trees. She would have missed it, would have driven right on past the narrow drive, if it hadn’t been for that strange intuition that had been her companion since leaving the hospital in Juarez. That inner voice shouted at her to turn at the last second and she obeyed without giving it a moment’s thought, jamming the wheel hard to the left to find herself on a partially overgrown track that led through the trees.

  Gabrielle parked the car at the top of the drive and got out. She stood there for a moment, staring at the place her husband called home. It seemed familiar and yet wasn’t. She felt anxious for the first time since setting out on this odyssey, wondering what she would find when she knocked on that door. Years had passed since her death at the hands of the Dorchester Demon and she had no idea what Cade had been doing since. Would he welcome her after all this time? Would he even believe she was who she said she was, given the gaps in her memory and the fact that she was wearing someone else’s body like a suit of secondhand clothes?

  The building was a solid-looking single-story structure with a wide porch stretching along the front. The late afternoon sun had already set behind the trees in back of the the house, sending shadows across the yard, but there were no lights on inside. Even worse, the place had that feeling of emptiness a house gets when unoccupied for some time, a sense of abandonment if you will, as if the very walls were pining for someone, anyone, to come home.

  Cade wasn’t here; she could feel it in her bones.

  Still, she hadn’t driven all this way just to be turned back by a few empty-looking windows. She headed up the walk and mounted the steps onto the porch. Autumn leaves had piled up in the corners; further evidence that no one had been there for several weeks. The blinds were down on all of the windows at the front of the house, preventing her from looking inside. On a whim, she decided to walk around back.

  The first sight that greeted her was a large, two-story wooden barn at the back of the property. A path had been worn in the grass, leading from the back door of the house to the entrance of the barn, marking it as a place Cade had spent a fair bit of time. Her curiosity aroused, she started toward it, only to stop in her tracks when she happened to glance to her left.

  A large elm dominated that side of the yard, midway between the house and the barn. Standing in the shadows beneath the trees’ sheltering boughs was a headstone.

  A chill ran up her spine at the sight of it.

  She turned and walked in that direction, a sudden suspicion blossoming in her mind. From this distance she could tell that the stone was new, the edges crisp and straight, as yet unworn by the harsh New England weather, and as she drew closer she could make out the word BELOVED etched deep into its surface. Beneath that was a quote from the Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities, the final words of the character Sydney Carlton as he waited for his death at the guillotine.

  It was her favorite quote from her favorite novel and it didn’t take a genius to recognize that she was staring at her own gravestone. For one dizzying moment, she wondered if her real body lay resting quietly in the cold earth beneath her feet, and then she pushed the thought away, too unnerved by it to contemplate it further.

  Unnerved or not, she couldn’t escape the fact that for her husband and everyone else she’d known, she died on that summer day when a killer had come to call.

  Poor Cade, she thought, knowing that the grave, as well as the headstone above it, could only be his handiwork. She doubted that she would have had the strength to go on if their positions had been reversed. He had meant the world to her and she knew that he had felt the same in return. Theirs had truly been a match made in heaven.

  Until the day the devil had come to call…

  With her heart threatening to break in her chest, she reached out and put her hand atop the headstone, feeling the need to connect with her missing husband in some physical way, even if just by proxy.

  A flash of brilliant blue ignited beneath her palm the moment her hand touched the stone and a blast of arcane energy raced along her arm and enveloped her entire body in a dazzling display of power and light. She tried to pull her hand away, tried to break the connection, but the spell she’d triggered had been designed specifically to prevent that from happening until it had run its course and she was left unable to move, paralyzed and frozen in place as the magick hissed and crackled around her.

  In that moment, she remembered.

  Remembered everything.

  The touch of the killer’s gun against the side of her head.

  The pain of the Adversary’s power as it spread across her body, tearing her soul loose from her physical form.

  The years she’d spent roaming the Beyond after escaping her captor, only to be dragged back to the Isle of Sorrows as bait for a trap when she thought it was finally over.

  The shock of awakening in that warehouse with the Necromancer’s magick coursing through her veins and the awareness that she wasn’t the only one living inside her head.

  The days spent a captive in her own body, her consciousness locked away in a corner of her mind while the Adversary wore her flesh like a puppeteer.

  Everything that had happened from the day she’d “died” all the way up to the final confrontation between Cade and his angelic allies on one side and the Adversary on the other came rushing back like a sudden, surging wave that threatened to drown her in the tide.

  And there, at the tail end of the flood of memory, was the knowledge that had set her on this journey in the first place, though she hadn’t been able to recall it at the time; the understanding of just what the Adversary had done in those final few moments of the ritual that had been intended to destroy it.

  Now Gabrielle knew the truth.

  Instead of setting her free, it scared her to death.

  When the flood of memories dimmed to a mere trickle, the power that held her in place finally released its hold on her and she fell backward, away from the stone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Some months earlier, Cade had shown Riley a rarely used road that ran through the woods at the rear of his property. The Echo Team commander used it now, getting close to the house without being exposed to anyone who might be watching the property from the front. He parked at the end of the trail, turning off the engine and getting out. The woods around him were quiet.

  Moving to the rear of the vehicle, he opened the back doors and lifted the floor in the back, exposing the equipment compartment that was built into all of the Order’s assault vehicles. He ignored the various weapons stored in their custom-fit cases and grabbed the trenching tool from where it was clipped to the underside of the lid.

  Closing and locking the vehicle, he set off on a short walk through the woods that eventually led him to the back of the barn-like structure that Cade used as his workshop. Riley stepped over to the rear wall, foun
d the small Templar cross carved into its surface, and then counted off twelve paces, the number of letters in Cade’s full name. At that point he began to dig.

  The ground was hard and the digging slow. It took him half an hour just to go down the first foot, but things began to ease up a little after that. At one point he thought he heard a car door slam out front, but when he didn’t hear anything else he got back to work. Just shy of an hour after he’d started, he had the full length of the freezer exposed to the evening air.

  He put the trenching tool aside and knelt down next to the freezer. A chain secured with a lock kept the door from being opened by just anyone. Thankfully Riley knew the combination – the date Cade joined the Order – and he quickly had it unlocked.

  Inside were half a dozen long, black duffel bags. Each had been cleared marked with a tag indicating their contents; firearms, ammunition, rations, demolitions, water, and electronics. The bags were heavy and he was only able to transport them two at a time back to where he’d parked the truck. He had made two trips and was covering the freezer back up when he heard a sharp cry of surprise from the direction of the house on the other side of the barn.

  Drawing his pistol, he went to investigate.

  As he came around the side of the barn, he spotted a woman lying in the grass in front of what was unmistakably a gravestone standing beneath the big elm tree.

  The stone had not been there the last time he’d visited Cade’s property.

  Nor, for that matter, had the woman.