Darkness Reigns

by Joseph Nassise

  But still, she'd believed.

  Believed that she could find Cade in time.

  Believed that he could somehow make things right, that his very presence could tilt the odds in their favor and allow good to triumph.

  She'd never imagined that the battle would be long over by the time she returned to this world with their secret weapon in tow.

  There, in that quiet little room, Gabrielle fought to keep a scream from erupting from her throat. She knew if she started, she might never stop.

  She was still trying to come to grips with it all, just sitting there dejectedly staring at the floor when Cade came into the room, shutting the door behind him so the others couldn't overhear.

  He came over and sat on the bed next to her. "Are you all right?" he asked.

  She spoke without looking up. "What do you think?"

  "If I had to guess," Cade said, "I'd say that you're feeling like someone just ripped the world out from beneath your feet. That your feeling responsible for the fact that civilization has gone the way of the Dodo. And one could make an argument that you're right."

  Gabrielle slowly turned to look at him.

  "What?" she said, in a voice that had gone dangerously flat.

  He waved her anger away, as if it were unimportant. "I didn't say that you were right – just that an argument could be made to support how you're feeling. But the truth is that you're way off base."

  "Is that right?" she asked, with no little sarcasm.

  "Yes, that's right. After all, if I hadn't gone off on a grief-induced walkabout to try and get myself killed when I was too chicken to do it myself, you'd never have had to come looking for me in the first place, right? And we wouldn't have wasted five years wandering around the Beyond. We might even have been here when the Adversary made his move. I'm telling you, decades from now, when the history books are being rewritten, I'll be listed as Cade Williams, Destroyer of Worlds or some shit like that. I doubt you'll even get a footnote. Seriously."

  Gabrielle looked away, shaking her head at his attempt at humor. "There won't be any history books."

  "What's that?"

  "I said there won't be any history books, you idiot! In another five years there won't be any people left to write them! Don't you get it? The fucking Adversary won!"

  Cade was silent a moment and then he said, softly, "No, he didn't win. Not as long as we're still here, still fighting."

  Gabrielle scoffed. "What, you think the two of us can take on an army of demons, never mind the Adversary and his gang of fallen angels, all on our own?"

  "I do,' he answered solemnly. "As long as I live and breathe I will fight to bring that bastard down. Third time's the charm, as they say. But I don't think we're alone."

  "You heard the man, Cade. They're systematically wiping out any opposition and herding everyone else into camps. They might call them cities, but you and I both know their little better than pens in which to fatten up their dinner. A few freedom fighters aren't going to make a difference."

  But he shook his head. "Against all odds, the Templars have held the evil in this world at bay for more than seventy years. We've been outnumbered and outgunned, so to speak, and yet we've still faithfully, and successfully, carried out our mission."

  Gabrielle whirled on him. "The Templars are gone, Cade!"

  "I don't think so, Gabbi. Your own visions say otherwise."

  The comment brought her up short. What visions was he talking about?

  When she asked as much, his answer surprised her.

  "Uriel showed you visions of the future and as far as I can tell, they've all come true. Or at least the ones you told me about. The success of the Adversary's gambit. The war and its aftermath. Even the privileged living high and mighty in the remains of New York City."

  "Okay, great. So what?"

  "So, I seem to remember you mentioning something about an attack on a motorcade by an armed group that sounded a heck of a lot like the Templars to me."

  Cade was right; the final vision Uriel had shown her did include an attack by freedom fighters of some kind or another against a protected target, most likely one of those in power in New York. Perhaps even the Regent that Jacob had mentioned. She tried to remember. Was there anything in the vision that could identify those guerrilla fighters as renegade Templars? She thought she remembered the fighters wearing grey jumpsuits like those Riley and his men had been wearing the day she'd entered the Beyond, but she couldn't be certain her "memory" wasn't just wishful thinking.

  Cade went on. "We don't know that Riley or any of those you met with survived the purge by Johannson and his men, but on the other hand we don't know they didn't either. I still think we should head for Ravensgate, see if there are any clues there to what happened to Riley and the others. Even if all we find is that the facility is now being used by these so-called Knights of the Red Fist, at least it will give us our first look at those we'll be fighting against, right?"

  Gabrielle couldn't argue with his logic. Ravensgate was as good as any place to start their search for Riley and the rest of the Templars, given that they'd struck out at the quarry.

  Before she could say anything further, there was a knock and then the door opened, admitting Jacob. From the expression on his face, whatever he'd come to say wasn't good news.

  "Look," he said, hesitantly. "I really appreciate your help with the patrol and saving my daughter and all. Really, I do."

  "But?" Gabrielle asked, sensing this was more to this than Jacob's thanks.

  The old man grimaced and his explanation came out in a rush. "But having you here under my roof after what you did to the members of that patrol - justified or not - is simply too dangerous for me and my daughter. The Regent's troops can search the farm at any time. It would be bad enough if they discovered I was keeping a woman of breeding age to myself, but to be found to be harboring fugitives from justice would mean certain death for us both. Never mind what they would do to the two of you. I'm sorry, but I just can't risk it."

  Cade opened his mouth to say something, but Gabrielle shushed him with a hand on his arm. She wouldn't put this man at risk any longer than necessary.

  "It's okay, Jacob. We understand."

  "I can let you stay the night, as it's not safe to travel after dark these days, but I need to ask you to head out in the morning."

  "No problem," Gabrielle replied. "Thank you for having us."

  Jacob nodded, mumbled, "Tis the least I could do," and then slipped back out the door, closing it behind him.

  "So it's decided then? We leave for Ravensgate in the morning?" Cade asked.

  Gabrielle didn't have a better suggestion.

  Ravensgate it would be.

  13

  They set out just after sunrise the next morning. Both Jacob and Stephanie had gotten up to see them off and there were tears in the young girl's eyes when she reached in to give Gabrielle a hug goodbye.

  "I put this together for you," Jacob said, handing over a well-worn, and well stuffed, backpack to Cade. "It's not much, just some food and water, but it should last you a few days."

  "Thank you." Cade took the pack and then shook the old man's hand. "You take care, both of yourself and that daughter of yours," he said.

  Jacob smiled. "With my every breath."

  After a final round of goodbyes, the pair set off on foot, leaving the farm further behind with every step they took. Jacob provided them with a hand-drawn map, showing them the places to avoid as they made their way east toward the outskirts of New Haven, where the Templar commandery had once hidden in plain sight, and they followed it as best they were able, sticking to the back roads to avoid encountering any of the Regent's patrols.

  They took a short break around noon, digging into Jacob's bag of supplies for a lunch consisting of home baked bread, hard salami, and cheese, washed down with swigs from a large plastic bottle of water that they shared between them.

  Once finished, they buried their trash and packed the
empty bottle into the pack to refill when the opportunity presented itself later and got underway once more.

  They reached Ravensgate by late afternoon.

  Or what was left of it, rather.

  They approached clandestinely through the woods that stood opposite the front gates, not knowing what they were going to find when they arrived. When Cade had last left the facility, it had been in the hands of Preceptor Johannson. Given what they now knew about his cooperation with the Adversary and his efforts to subsume the Order from within, they needed to be careful. They could be walking right into a hornet's nest of danger. Cade had been declared an enemy of the Order, after all, and he knew Johannson and his men would stop at nothing to see him tried for his crimes and executed. They'd start by observing the commandery from the safety of the woods and decide what to do from there.

  But when Cade saw that the iron gates that guarded the entrance to the commandery were hanging loose in their frames and that the stone pillars that supported them were covered in a tangled growth of ivy, he knew they were in the clear. The facility must have been abandoned some time before, for even that idiot Johansson wouldn't let the defenses fall into such disrepair.

  What he didn't expect was the extent of the destruction that they found on the other side of the gates.

  Ravensgate had been one of the prime Templar facilities on the east coast, rivaled only by the Preceptor's home base in Bristol, Rhode Island. The sprawling manor house that served as the outward representation of the Templar's presence was three stories high and consisted of several wings stretching in various directions. But the real facility, the one that housed the various combat units that called Ravensgate home, was below ground. It was there that the men and women of the new Templar Order trained, worked, and lived while dedicating themselves to protecting the rest of humanity from the things that went bump in the night.

  Or, at least, that's what they'd done before being betrayed from within by one of their own.

  As Cade and Gabrielle slipped through the gates and entered the grounds proper, they could see across the wide lawn to the remains of the manor house. Only about a third of the building was still standing. The rest was little more than blackened ruins, the roof having collapsed inward in the midst of what appeared to have been a massive fire at some time in the past.

  Or a massive explosion, Cade thought.

  Having examined and then improved on the facility's defensive plans after the attack by the Necromancer and his allies several years ago, Cade knew that it was unlikely that the fire had broken out accidentally. If it had, the emergency systems would have isolated it long before it could have consumed the whole facility.

  No, this looked more like the result of an attack than an accidental disaster. Three days ago, Cade would have said the attackers must have been enemies of the Order, the demons or their supernatural allies, but knowing Riley had managed to gather some of the Templars to his cause in those last days made him wonder if the attackers had been members of the Order themselves. Those who still believed in its mission of protecting mankind from the evil in the world.

  He said as much to Gabrielle.

  "You think this is Riley's handiwork, then?" she asked.

  Cade shrugged. "His or one of those who backed his cause at least."

  He wasn't willing to commit to anything more than that, for he knew that believing Riley had lived through the firefight at the quarry might just be wishful thinking. Cade knew from the search they'd conducted at the rendezvous point that at least some of the Templar rebels, if he could call them that, had survived, so seeing this as their handiwork was a natural progression for them. But the reality was that it could have been anyone with access to some heavy weaponry and that included everyone from the federal government to the local police force, never mind armed militias and the like. At the moment, there was no way to tell who it had been.

  They crossed the wide lawn, now overgrown so much that it nearly reached their waists, and passed the oversized fountain that stood to the left of the drive. To Cade's surprise, the fountain still had water in it, the self-recycling system that ran it apparently still operational and functioning after all this time.

  The manor house was a different story.

  Only a third of it still stood, the remainder having caved in upon itself, as if it had grown weary of standing against the elements after those who had occupied its halls for so long had fled, leaving the structure lost and abandoned on its own.

  As they drew closer it became clear that the destruction hadn't been entirely natural; bullet holes marked the exterior walls and there was more than one section that was blacked with the residue of explosives and the flash marks that heralded the use of magicks. A battle had been fought here, that much was certain.

  Cade strode up the front steps - noting the crack that still split their surface, a reminder of the attack the commandery had suffered at the hands of the Council of Nine several years earlier - and through the open door into the interior. From the debris scattered across the floor and gathered in the corners, it was clear that the building had been open to the elements for some time. It was also clear that it had been abandoned in a hurry; shell casings rolled underfoot and skeletons still lay where they had fallen in the midst of the fighting that had taken their lives. Most of the clothing had since rotted away, but scraps of grey cloth here and there told Cade that the dead had once been fellow Templars dressed in the Order's standard battle dress uniforms, or BDUs, but whether they had been on the side of righteousness or corrupted by Johannson and his infernal allies was impossible to tell.

  With Gabrielle just a few steps behind, Cade made his way through the Great Hall and deeper into the interior of the building. Everywhere he looked he found the same thing - evidence of a prolonged firefight that seemed to have damaged the structure around them so badly that the facility itself had been abandoned.

  At one point he stopped and, stripping the glove from his right hand, squatted down near one of the skeletons lying at his feet.

  "You sure you want to do that?" Gabrielle asked.

  Cade shrugged. "Might be the only way we figure out what happened here."

  Before he could give it more thought, and possibly talk himself out of it, Cade reached down and put his bare palm flat across the forehead of the skull on the ground in front of him, like someone checking for a fever.

  Darkness.

  Then...

  The crash of gunfire.

  The cries of the wounded mingled with the shouts of the living.

  They've broken through the southern perimeter, a voice says over the radio in his ear, but he doesn't have time to respond, for they'd broken through here as well and it was all he could do to keep the covering fire going while the others tried to drag the wounded out of the line of fire.

  His weapon ran dry and he dropped back around the corner he'd been firing from, yanking free the magazine and inserting a new one.

  He spun back around the corner, his gun coming up to continue his covering fire, only to find a bearded man in black BDUs charging his position, gun blazing.

  A sharp pain spread through his chest and he felt himself falling backward...

  Cade pulled his hand free and fought to calm his racing heart. Sometimes it was hard to separate memory from reality when using his psychometric power and more than once he'd come back to himself carrying the same injuries that he'd seen his subject experience.

  Thankfully, he didn't come back from this one with a bullet in his chest.

  "What was it? What did you see?" Gabrielle asked.

  What had he seen? Cade thought about it for a moment and then shook his head.

  "Hard to say. Two groups fighting each other, but we knew that already. I wasn't able to see anything that shed any light on who they were or what they were after, unfortunately."

  They continued searching the ruins for another hour or so, but didn't find anything that told them more about what had happened here. Reluctan
tly, Cade finally indicated they should call it quits.

  They made camp inside the ruins, against a corner section of wall that was still standing. While Cade cleared the floor of debris to give them a place to lie down for the night, Gabrielle gathered some loose bricks and built a fire pit angled toward the corner, using the wall around them as both a wind-break and a reflector for the heat of the flames.

  They dug into the rations Jacob had made for them, then settled in for the night. Fifteen minutes later, Gabrielle was snoring gently at Cade's side.

  14

  Cade waited until he was certain that Gabrielle was asleep, then eased his arm out from beneath her sleeping form and rose to his feet. He waited a moment, making sure that she didn't awaken when she felt his absence, and then quietly stepped to the fire and withdrew one of the burning logs. Holding it aloft like a torch, he slipped away through the ruins until he reached the fountain he'd noticed earlier.

  He carefully stepped up on its edge and then looked down, watching as the dark water caught the light of the torch and cast his image across the surface. He watched his reflection waver in the water for a moment, considering whether or not to carry out his plans. He glanced back in the direction where Gabrielle was sleeping, hesitating, then steeled himself and decided that she'd be fine for the brief period he'd be gone. Without another thought he gave a sharp mental nudge to that spot deep in the depths of his mind that activated the Mirror's Road and stepped forward, vanishing from sight the moment the sole of his foot hit the surface of the water.

  He reappeared half-a-second later, crashing through the reflective glass surface of a display case in the midst of the vault hidden several stories beneath the ground floor of what was left of the commandery. Thankfully, the torch remained lit; he hadn't been certain the flames would survive the jump through the Veil with it. He held it aloft, letting its light spill around him, illuminating the immediate area.