Nephilim's Rise Read online

  Nephilim's Rise

  Joseph Nassise

  Contents

  VIP Club

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  VIP Club

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  1

  “After all this time, you’ve got nothing to say?” Knight Captain Matthew Riley, Cade’s oldest friend, asked with a smile on his weather-beaten face.

  Cade stood frozen for a moment in the entrance to Major Hale’s office, staring in at the three men inside the room - Major Hale, Captain Riley, and the towering figure of the archangel, Uriel - and then, with a shout of joy, crossed the floor and wrapped his former executive officer in a bear hug that somehow managed to envelop the other man despite his larger size. They pounded each other on the back, genuinely happy to see each other. For Cade, it had only been a few months but for Riley it had been more than five years since he’d laid eyes on his friend.

  Cade released Riley and took a step back, but kept his hands tightly gripped around the other man’s upper arms. His words tumbled out in a rush as he said, “You have no idea how happy I am to see you still alive, but we don’t have time to celebrate. Gabrielle, and several of our troops, are being held in the Regent’s headquarters in the old Trump Tower building in Manhattan. If we mount an assault immediately, we have a good chance of getting her and the rest of our people back.”

  Riley opened his mouth to reply, but Major Hale beat him to the punch.

  “That’s insane, Williams. Attacking that place without a plan would be tantamount to suicide!”

  “Says who?” the former knight commander asked, letting go of Riley and whirling on the other man.

  “Says anyone with half a brain,” Hale scoffed, exasperation in his tone. “You’re talking about a fortress full of troops deep in the heart of enemy territory. Just getting there would take a miracle, never mind the resistance you’d face once you’re inside. Busting in there now would practically guarantee that we’d get the prisoners killed before the sun came up tomorrow, never mind the assault force that goes in after them. We have to be smarter than that.”

  “If we wait, the prisoners won’t stand a chance. They’ve already shot all of the men. I don’t need to remind you of what they do to the women, do I?!”

  Hale glared. “Of course, you don’t! But this is war and terrible things happen in warfare, I’m afraid. All of us knew that long before we joined the resistance. We knew what we were signing up for. I guarantee you that not a single one of them would want us to throw our lives away in some vain attempt to rescue them without doing everything we can to make the mission a success and right now that means not rushing off half-cocked!”

  “He’s right, Cade,” Riley said, stepping in between the two men as he saw the anger rise in Cade’s eyes. “The raid on the work camp kicked over the hornet’s nest. Rushing in there right now would simply stir it up further. Better to wait and let things calm down. That will give us time to plan the proper response.”

  “She’ll be dead by then, Riley,” Cade replied. “You know it as well as I do.”

  “I don’t know that and neither do you. Given all she’s survived to date - this is the woman who came back from the dead, remember? - I think those holding her prisoner have more to worry about than she does.”

  Cade shook his head and was about to respond when Uriel interrupted.

  “There is no need to worry.”

  His voice was deep, commanding. The other men turned to look at him as he spoke for the first time since Cade entered the room. “Your wife is safe for the time being.”

  “And how would you know that?” the former knight commander asked.

  “I have seen it.”

  Rather than reassure the other man, Uriel’s answer only seemed to inflame him further.

  “Like the way you foresaw the death of Adversary when I stabbed my wife in the heart with that fucking blade of yours?” Cade snarled. “Didn’t quite work out as expected, now did it?”

  “No, it did not,” Uriel answered truthfully. “This is different, however.”

  “Sure, it is! And let me guess, I’m just supposed to take your word for it, right?”

  To Cade’s surprise, the tall figure of the archangel shook his head. “No. Even I would not be inclined to take the word of someone who had been so grievously wrong before without proof to back it up. If it is proof you need to trust us, then proof you shall have.”

  Uriel turned and looked at Riley. The unspoken request was met with a nod from the renegade Templar.

  “Come,” Uriel said to Cade, before turning and slipping out of the room with barely a sound.

  Cade glanced at Riley, surprised by the archangel’s deference to his former teammate, but when the other man inclined his head in the archangel’s direction, Cade hustled to catch up.

  Riley and Hale followed closely on his heels.

  Uriel led the trio through the hallways of the commandery until they reached the scrying room. Cade had been here a couple of times since arriving at the commandery, for he found the work of the Order’s mystics to be fascinating, especially now that their powers seemed to have increased in the wake of what the Seven had done to the world.

  In the center of the room was a large stone cistern about two feet in height. The cistern was filled to the rim with crystal clear water, which acted as a kind of projection screen during a scrying ritual to display whatever it was that the mystics were seeking. Uriel headed straight for it.

  Upon reaching it, he let the top half of his robe fall to his waist, revealing his bare skin and the images that danced upon his flesh. Cade had seen the phenomena before, the day he’d first encountered the Forsaken One in the bell tower on the island of Poveglia, but behind him he heard Hale gasp in surprise at the sight of all those tattoos seemingly moving under their own accord.

  As Cade looked on, the tattoo in the center of Uriel’s chest began to swirl about itself, the images flickering past in the blink of an eye, like the faces of a fluttering deck of cards in the hands of a master magician until, at last, one image in particular rose above the others and settled into view. At that very moment Uriel plunged his arm in the pool up to his elbow and the image that seconds before had begun to manifest on his chest suddenly swam into view on the surface of the water.

  Cade stared in shock and awe.

  The image was of Gabrielle.

  She was standing in an arena of some kind, thick sand beneath her sandaled feet and rows of spectators visible in the stands behind her. She was dressed in a leather outfit that reminded Cade of Zena the Warrior Princess and she held a gleaming sword in one fist.

  As he looked on, she turned to face a howler demon that was currently racing toward her across the arena sands.

  Unable to help himself, Cade shouted “No!” and leaned forward, reaching out as if to warn her. The moment his fingers touched the surface of the water the image vanished.

  “What happened?!” he shouted, turning to Uriel in fear and dismay. “Get her back!”

  “I’m afraid I cannot,” Uriel replied, removing his hand from the pool and shaking the water from it. “Each moment can only be viewed once and nothing in my power can change that.”

  “But she’s in the middle of a battle for her life!”

  “Not yet, she is not. The moment you viewed is something from her future, not her present or her past. It is yet to come. We have time, but we must make judicious use of it.”

  “We will go after her, and the others, Cade, when the time and circumstances are right,” Riley said. “You have my word on it.”

  Cade stared at him, wondering if he could trust him, and then realized how ridiculous his present line of thinking was. Of course, he could trust him. This was Riley, after all, the man whose hands he put his trust and faith into time and time again. He was more than a brother-in-arms and when he gave his word, he meant it.

  What the heck is wrong with you?

  For once, his inner voice didn’t reply. It had been a long and arduous day; he’d leave it at that.

  Cade nodded.

  It would have to do.

  2

  Riley’s duties kept him busy for much of the rest of the day, but Cade joined him for dinner that evening. Uriel was there as well, but since the archangel didn’t require sustenance like his human companions, he took a seat away from the table and was soon seemingly lost in his own musings. When the meal was done, the two old friends did what they could to catch each other up on the events of the past five years.

  For Cade, there wasn’t much to tell; he’d spent the majority of that time in the Beyond, throwing himself into a never-ending assault against the spectres that inhabited that pla
ce as penance for what he believed he’d done to Gabrielle. He relayed how shocked he’d been when Gabriel had appeared and explained the reality of what the Adversary had done and his dismay at returning to the real world to find that all their efforts to defeat Asharael had been for naught.

  Those intervening years had been radically different for Riley, however, and Cade was anxious to hear what his friend had been through as a result.

  “Gabbi told me about the battle at the quarry,” he said, “about watching that grenade go off at your feet just as she was pulled through the portal into the Beyond. After hearing that, I was all but certain that had been the end for you.”

  “Makes two of us, truth be told,” Riley replied. He was silent for a moment, no doubt due to the difficulty in remembering such trauma. Cade was about to tell him to forget it, the details were unimportant, when his friend finally shrugged.

  “Our brooding friend over there,” Riley said, inclining his head in Uriel’s direction, “would call it God’s will that I survived, but these days I’m more inclined to call it a little bit of old-fashioned good luck. Thanks to what can only be described as a perfect storm of events, I’m standing here with a titanium foot instead of being torn to pieces by that grenade. Ain’t life strange?”

  He paused, looking for the best place to start his story and Cade gave him the time he needed. “Johannson’s biggest mistake was striking when some of the teams were in the field. If he’d waited and bided his time for us to return to the commanderies, I suspect we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation today.

  “By moving too soon, those he attacked first were able to get word out through the Code Black system you created. The rest of us scattered, just as you’d trained us to do, going to ground all of the country in small groups, pulling the hole in after us wherever we could. It was Black Friday all over again, except this time we were running from our own.

  “Unfortunately for Echo, we discovered too late that we had a traitor in our midst. Sergeant Green not only relayed out position to Johannson and his men, but also tried to kill your wife when it became clear that you were vital to our long-term success against the demons and she was the only one who could make the trip into the Beyond to find you. After we dispatched Green, Johannson must have figured there wasn’t anything more he could gain by waiting and he sent a large strike force against us where we were holed up in the quarry.”

  Riley shrugged and that one gesture said all he needed to say about the inevitability of a small force trying to hold back a much larger one when supplies were limited. “We did what we could to hold them off, to give Gabrielle time to open a portal into the Beyond, but they just kept throwing more bodies at us as if their losses were irrelevant. Eventually we had to retreat. Our intent was to use the back door and escape through the old quarry railway system, but they managed to break through before we could get everyone out.

  “We made a last stand in the same room where Gabrielle was working to open the gate. The room was filled with the roar of firearms and the screams of injured men, near deafening in the narrow confines of the space, but I tell you, I’ll never forget the sound of that grenade bouncing across the floor toward me, the distinct chink, chink, chink noise it made as it skipped across the tiles. Everything else faded to silence as my focus narrowed to just that fist-sized hunk of metal that had set itself on a collision course with what were apparently the final seconds of my life. I knew I was a goner; it spun to a stop a mere foot from where I stood and I remember glancing back at Gabrielle and thinking in that moment how ironic it was that I’d managed to survive hand-to-hand combat with some of the nastiest, mother-fucking creatures ever to crawl out of the depths of hell and here I was being taken down by some asshole with a gun in his hand and a fireteam at his back. An asshole that belonged to the same damned Order that I did, no less!”

  “Sounds like a rough time.”

  Riley shook his head. “It was fucking embarrassing, is what it was.”

  The former commander of the Echo Team laughed. “Clearly not embarrassing enough to kill you, though.”

  “True,” Riley said, shaking his head, “but it was damned close and it wasn’t thanks to anything that I did, I can tell you that. In the end, it all came down to timing. In the split second before that grenade went off, your wife finally managed to open that gate to the Beyond. The portal formed at a point equidistant to both of us and it sucked most of the energy out of the room the instant it opened, taking ninety percent of the explosive blast from the grenade with it.”

  Riley reached down and rapped on his prothesis with the knuckles of one hand. “The grenade might have taken everything from my knee down, but that was all it took. That portal saved my life.”

  He went on. “With Gabrielle’s mission accomplished, Uriel could turn his attention to other matters, specifically me. As the last of my men fought to keep the rest of the traitors from reaching us, he cauterized what was left of my leg somehow - he won’t give me specifics - and then snatched me up like I was a sack of toys and he was Father fucking Christmas.

  “As we retreated deeper into the room, he used some more angelic mumbo jumbo to bring the ceiling down on the advancing troops, cutting us off from them and buying us time to escape. I was still conscious, heaven knows how, and was able to direct the men to the back door.”

  Cade nodded. He and Gabbi had used the same back door to escape the sneak of demons that tried to corner them when they’d visited the scene of the battle several weeks earlier.

  Riley continued. “After that, things got a bit hazy. I have vague recollections of escaping through the old railway tunnel, of rendezvousing with members of Delta, and of the surgeon taking off what was left of my leg later that night once we’d reached a position of relative safety. I’m not sure if they are actual memories or just images my mind invented to fill in the missing gaps once someone told me what happened and I guess it doesn’t really matter at this point.”

  Cade was silent for a time, taking it all in. His friend was lucky to be alive. Even luckier to have survived what came after.

  “And the war?” he eventually asked. “How soon after your injury did all that happen?”

  “It took a few months for all hell, literally, to break loose but I’m sure the plan was set in motion long before that. Once in control of the Templars, Asharael no longer had to worry about active opposition to his efforts. In a way, we were our own worst enemies. By keeping the rest of the world in the dark about the reality of the supernatural around us, they weren’t prepared to fight back on their own when we were no longer there to protect them.

  “While the Adversary was focused on the Templars, the rest of his scream infiltrated major world governments, rising up through the chains of power until they became the personal confidantes of the leaders of those nations, whispering fear and hate and destruction in their ears. Like Grima Wormtongue’s hold over King Theoden, but a thousand times more powerful, for these were princes of hell and not some foolish mortal with delusions of grandeur. The age-old mantra of strike them before they strike you was made over and over again, until someone did it. Someone through reason and caution to the winds and pressed the button. Before you could say Armageddon, the birds were in the air and speeding in a thousand different directions.

  “If God had been paying attention, it would have been all over right then and there, I suspect. He could have taken us out of our misery, leveled the playing field, and started creation all over again. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. God was either looking for payback for all the sinful shit we’d done over the generations or he was on vacation in Aruba or something and missed it when it all went down. Heaven only knows.”