Fall of Night: A Templar Chronicles Novel Read online

  FALL OF NIGHT

  SUMMARY

  New York Times and USA Today Bestseller Joseph Nassise continues his internationally acclaimed Templar Chronicles series with Fall of Night!

  At long last former Knight Commander Cade Williams has defeated the Adversary, but his victory has come at a terrible cost. His wife, Gabrielle, is no more. His reputation lies in tatters, his trust in others broken. His closest friends and allies are now at risk from the very Order they pledged their lives to maintain. If it could go wrong, it has.

  Unable to bear the reality of what he has done, all Cade wants to do is find a deep hole and pull it in after him. Let the world go on without him, for all he loves is lost and he sees no reason to continue.

  Cade thinks it is over.

  Cade is wrong.

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  WELCOME TO THE ORDER

  The book that you are reading is part of the Templar Chronicles series, in which the Templar Knights have been resurrected as a secret combat arm of the Church, charged with defending mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. The series is set in the modern world, where the average Joe is unaware of both the reality of the supernatural world and of the existence of the Order itself, a situation the Templars work diligently to maintain.

  At center stage is Knight Commander Cade Williams, a veteran of the Order and a man torn between his thirst for vengeance against the supernatural creature that murdered his wife and his need to discover what happened to him during that same encounter several years before. Cade leads the famed Echo Team, a special forces-style unit that is called in only when the situation has become particularly dire. Echo is the best of the best, there is no doubt about that, but the fact that they are led by a man rumored to have more than a few unusual abilities of his own leave many within the Order more than a little uncomfortable in dealing with them.

  The Templar Chronicles Series

  The Heretic (Book One)

  A Scream of Angels (Book Two)

  A Tear in the Sky (Book Three)

  Infernal Games (Book Four)

  Judgment Day (Book Five)

  Fall of Night (Book Six)

  Templar Missions Novella Series

  Shades of Blood and Darkness(Novella #1)

  The Hungry Dark (Novella #2)

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  As it pertains to the character of Anna Rodriguez, I am aware that women did not serve in front-line ground units during the Second Iraq War and therefore would not have been present at the Battle of Fallujah or the Battle of Ramadi.

  That said, this isn’t our world but one very close to ours and in this world women are treated as equals in every sense of the word, including serving in front-line combat units.

  FALL OF NIGHT

  A Templar Chronicles Novel

  Joseph Nassise

  CHAPTER ONE

  The handle of the knife that Cade had used to kill his wife, Gabrielle, stared back at him accusingly from the left side of her chest.

  He reached out, intending to pull the blade free so he could get on with the rest of what he had to do, but his hands began trembling long before they got close to the handle and he felt a wave of nausea rising up in his throat, threatening to end up on the floor at his feet.

  Coward, his conscience sneered. You did this. She’s dead because of you. And now you don’t even have the guts to clean up the mess you’ve made.

  He wanted to curse at it, rail at it, demand that it shut the hell up, but in the end he did nothing more than stand there mutely listening to it because of one simple fact.

  His conscience was right.

  Gabrielle’s death was his fault.

  There was no getting around it.

  Even if he had not wielded the knife that had stolen her last breath and spilled her blood – which he had – he would still be responsible for what happened to her.

  The Adversary had played a role, of course. If it hadn’t shown up in their house and taken Gabrielle captive all those years ago then who knew where they might be now? But the Adversary had entered their lives on that fateful summer day and Cade failed to stop him, failed to protect his beloved bride from the Adversary’s vile touch. That, above all else, sealed her fate.

  Everything that came after that had been nothing more than the offshoot of that first failure, symptoms of the disease rather than the cause. The years her spirit spent trapped in the Beyond, lingering between the lands of the living and those of the dead, brought there by the very demon that Cade had failed to stop. The Necromancer’s theft of her physical form from Cade’s own home after Cade had dug her out of the grave, determined to try and put things right. The wards he’d put into place to protect her had not been enough and one of his personal enemies had taken advantage of that fact, had used Gabrielle’s body as the cornerstone of a grotesque plan to bring the Adversary back from the infernal realm where Cade had banished him.

  But even those terrible acts were eclipsed by what had come next, the Adversary’s possession of Gabrielle herself. He had used her body for his own vile purposes while her consciousness was trapped inside her mind, a prisoner of the horrible evil that had taken up refuge throughout her own flesh and blood. Cade couldn’t begin to imagine what that must have been like for Gabrielle; he shuddered at the very thought.

  In the end, he really hadn’t had a choice; even now, in the depths of his grief, he recognized that. To allow the Adversary to continue would have been unconscionable, but he had been all but prepared to do just that when Gabrielle had taken matters into her own hands and had driven the blade Cade had been holding deep into her chest. The magic inherent in the ancient artifact had done the rest.

  No, his conscience said. It was you and your failure that did this. Nothing more and nothing less.

  After it was all over, after the Seven sucked the Adversary from Gabrielle’s physical form, Riley and the other knights helped Cade load her body into the back of one of the SUVs that they arrived in. Cade drove straight home and brought his wife into the home they never had the opportunity to share when she was alive, placed her on the table where they might have broken bread together in another time had things been different for them.

  And here he was.

  He intended to wash her body and prepare her for burial, to honor her in death the way he’d been unable to do in life, but the reality of what he needed to do kept bringing him up short.

  “You’re running out of time, Williams,” he said, the sound of his voice startlingly loud in the otherwise silent kitchen. “Do what needs to be done and then get the hell out of here before the others come looking for you.”

  He knew the Preceptor and his goons couldn’t be too far behind. Once they found Riley and questioned him, it wouldn’t be long before they put two and two together and wound up outside his door. It wasn’t all that hard to figure out where Cade would go in the aftermath of the death of his wife. Where did anyone go when tragedy struck?

  Home, of course.

  Johannson would expect him to do the same and for all Cade knew assault teams might already be on their way. He was a fugitive, after all, and not just your average one either. He was an official enemy of the Order, accused of conspiring with a particularly nasty fallen angel known as the Adversary that the Templars had been hunting for years. It wasn’t true, of course, far from it, but things had gotten complicated enough that Cade wouldn’t be surprised if they shot him on sight and asked questions later.

  One side of him actually wouldn’t mind going out that way – at least the pain and the misery would be over – but the other side of him refused to allow the Preceptor the satisfaction of knowing he had beate
n him. He had other plans for what was to come next but before he could move on to those, he needed to deal with what was right in front of him.

  “Now or never, Williams.”

  Steeling himself, he reached out, grabbed the handle of the knife with one gloved hand and pulled.

  The blade came free with a wet sucking sound and Cade knew that he’d be hearing that sound every day and night for the rest of his life.

  Gabrielle’s heart had long since stopped beating and so nothing but a thin line of blood leaked out of the wound once he pulled the blade free. The weapon felt heavy in his hand and he nearly dropped it as he turned and walked the few steps it took for him to reach the nearby sink. He turned on the water, pretending not to notice his trembling hands in the process, and rinsed the blood off the blade before setting it on the counter.

  His conscience had stopped jabbering at him, as if respecting the solemnity of the moment now that he had actively begun the process, and for that he was grateful. He blamed himself for what happened; he didn’t need the voice in the back of his head adding to the clamor.

  Taking a pair of kitchen shears from the drawer next to the sink, Cade turned back to his wife’s body and quickly but efficiently cut her clothing away, pulling the bloody scraps out from underneath her to leave her lying naked on the wooden table that he’d built for her years before. Putting down the shears, he picked up a washcloth he’d set aside earlier, soaked it in warm water, and slowly began the mentally arduous task of cleaning her body for burial.

  It was hard, harder then he’d expected in fact, and just five minutes into the task the tears were streaming silently down his face. He knew that his heart would never be whole again.

  It was one thing to hold your wife close to you when her flesh was warm and her heart beating powerfully in her chest; it was something entirely different when that heart had ceased to beat and her flesh had grown cold and clammy.

  Still he did it, lifting her torso up off the table and holding it steady against his chest so that he could clean her shoulders and back. It was something that needed to be done and Cade had never been one to shy away from his duty to the living or the dead.

  Every few minutes he would rinse the towel in the sink, washing away the dirt and the blood that clung to it, and then turn back to the job at hand. His touch was gentle, tender, and if his hands shook a little more than he wanted no one else was there to notice.

  When he was finished, he threw the dirty towel in the sink and used a few more to dry Gabrielle’s body before lifting it in his arms and carrying it out into the living room where he’d already laid out a sheet from the linen closet upstairs. He placed her on her back in the middle of the sheet, stretching out her limbs so they lay straight alongside her body and brushing the hair back from her face.

  Cade stared down at her for several long moments, seeing everything and nothing at the same time, then bent and gently kissed her pale lips.

  “Hold a seat for me, my love,” he whispered to her softly. “I’ll be there soon.”

  He took one edge of the sheet and stretched it over her, tucking it in beneath her body. He folded down the top and bottom ends and then wrapped the opposite side around her in the other direction, much like you would when swaddling a newborn baby. He stitched the edge closed with a large needle and a thick length of fishing twine.

  More than half-an-hour had passed since he’d started preparing his wife for burial and now that the body was ready he needed to turn his attention to the grave itself. Climbing to his feet he returned to the kitchen and then went out the back door to the yard beyond.

  A large elm dominated the left side of the rear yard and it was there, beneath its sheltering boughs that he intended to put Gabrielle to rest one last time. He got a shovel and a pick axe from the tool shed, found a suitable spot in front of the tree, and began digging.

  The recent stretch of warm weather had softened up the earth, allowing him to cut through it with the pick axe without much difficulty. After breaking up the topsoil, he switched to the shovel and began the arduous process of digging a hole deep and wide enough for his wife’s earthly remains. Thankfully it was pretty much a mindless task and he could let his thoughts drift as he drove the shovel into the dirt, scooped out a load of earth, and threw it into a pile off to one side before repeating the process.

  Dig, lift, throw.

  Dig, lift, throw.

  Don’t think about why you are digging this hole or who it is for, just concentrate on the act itself.

  Dig, lift, throw.

  It took awhile, but eventually the hole was finished.

  Stepping back, he leaned on the shaft of his shovel and surveyed the grave in front of him. It was roughly four feet across, six feet long and five and a half, maybe six feet deep. It wasn’t perfect – digging graves wasn’t exactly in his wheelhouse, after all – but it would do. He knew Gabbi would understand.

  He tossed the shovel aside and headed back into the house, its once comfortable silence feeling eerie and strange. Just a few weeks ago he’d been hopeful that the old Connecticut farmhouse would once again resound with his wife’s laughter. Now he knew it would forever be as silent as stone. If his heart hadn’t already been broken it would have torn asunder at the thought and for just a moment his steps faltered.

  Man up, Williams, he demanded of himself. You aren’t done yet.

  He walked into the living room, bent down and picked up his wife’s body, and then headed back the way he had come, determined to get this over with before his emotions got the better of him. He crossed the back lawn, stood for a moment staring down into the hole in the ground before him, and then jumped into it with his wife still in his arms. He laid her body down on the bare earth knowing that without the protection afforded by embalmment or a wooden or steel-case coffin, that same earth would reclaim her into its arms just as nature intended. Cade knew his wife would have appreciated that, for she was never one for pomp and circumstance.

  Satisfied with her arrangement, Cade climbed out of the grave, grabbed the handle of the shovel, and began to reverse his effort, doing his best not to look at his wife’s shroud-wrapped form as he began refilling the hole he’d just spent the last two hours digging. It went faster in this direction than it had in the other and an hour after he’d started he found himself shoveling the last few clumps of dirt atop the grave.

  His arms and back ached, but the job was almost finished.

  One thing left to do.

  Throwing the shovel down next to the pick axe, he retraced his steps back to the tool shed and disappeared inside only to emerge a few minutes later struggling to pull a dolly containing the headstone he’d painstakingly picked out for his wife in the days after she’d died. Not this time, but the first time.

  After he pulled her still-living body from her grave several months ago with his friend, Riley’s help, Cade went back to the cemetery the next night and stole the grave marker. He hadn’t felt right just leaving it out there over what was by then an empty grave, so he’d stashed it under a tarp in the shed, hoping not to need it again for a few decades at least.

  He’d been wrong on that count.

  He manhandled the dolly over to the side of the grave and then lowered the stone into place where it belonged. Stepping back, he stared at the inscription carved into the grey New Hampshire granite. There was no name, no dates, just the word BELOVED and a quote from Dickens that she’d remarked upon many years ago.

  It is a far, far better rest I go to, than I have ever known.

  Cade ran his fingers over the inscription, feeling the rough cut of the stone against his skin and fervently hoped that this time the sentiment would prove to be true, that she would indeed go to the rest she so righteously deserved. She’d done so much for so many and only the barest handful would ever understand the horrors that she’d rescued the world from through her sacrifice.

  Your fault, the voice of his conscience whispered, and he took that as his cue to get o
n with things. He’d finished what he’d come to do but that didn’t mean his work was done.

  Far from it.

  He returned the dolly and the tools to the shed, locking it behind him more out of habit than anything else for he didn’t expect to live long enough to return to this place again, not where he was going. It was time to pay for his failures, time to pay for his sins.

  Lord knew there were enough of them, he thought, glancing over at his wife’s grave.

  This time, thankfully, his conscience remained silent.

  He returned to the house just long enough to grab his sword off the kitchen counter where it had been waiting for him to finish his task and then he left the house behind for the last time, stepping off the porch and heading across the yard toward the barn he’d long since converted into his workshop. He unlocked the twin padlocks that secured the double doors and then pushed them open wide. Crossing the threshold, he turned and slammed them shut behind him with a heavy thud of finality.

  A few moments passed and then the faint sound of breaking glass could be heard from somewhere deep inside the workshop.

  After that, nothing but silence.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The woman stood before the mirror, staring at the unfamiliar face that stared back at her from within the glass.

  Slowly, tentatively, she reached up and ran her fingers over her face, watching as her reflection did the same. The image looking back at her from the mirror was a decidedly Hispanic one, the features vastly different from those she’d shown the world up to that point but pretty in their own, unique way. This face was wide where hers was narrow, dark-complexioned where hers was almost porcelain white, and her chestnut-colored locks had been replaced by a short weave of raven hair with a cut so choppy it looked like it had gone ten rounds with a lawn mower rather than thirty minutes with a pair of styling shears. She could see the edge of some kind of tattoo snaking up the side of her neck at the edge of her hospital gown, too. The only features she recognized were the eyes staring back at her out of that face, eyes so brilliantly green that she’d once been told that they could make an emerald jealous.