Excerpt. © Reprinted
by permission. All rights reserved.
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 sidearm, 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.
Books in the Templar Chronicles series:
