Fall of Night: A Templar Chronicles Novel Read online

  After all that she’d been through she knew she shouldn’t be surprised at this latest development, but this was hitting her harder than most things did.

  She was in someone else’s body, for heaven’s sake!

  It was almost too much to believe.

  The events of earlier that evening were a bit hazy; she’d awoken disoriented and uncertain of so many things. Who and where she was. How she had gotten there. What had happened to her. All the things that the average person typically used to ground themselves in the here and now without even realizing it had been just beyond her mental reach and she’d been lost as a result, adrift on a sea of confusion that threatened to overwhelm her with every passing moment. Panic had threatened, and she remembered biting her lip to keep from screaming. She fought back the fear with the same grit and determination that had kept her sane throughout her long ordeal with the Adversary. She’d managed to get herself under control, though just barely.

  A single thought had been repeating itself over and over again in her mind and she’d murmured the same to the doctor when he finally appeared.

  I need to speak to my husband. It’s a matter of life and death.

  The doctor, Vargas, ignored her rambling, no doubt assuming that she was merely disoriented. She’d just spent the last six months in a coma after all or so he’d told her when he could finally get her to stop demanding to see her husband. A husband she didn’t have, according to him.

  His pronouncement about her non-existent husband – a husband she vividly remembered - hadn’t scared her as much as the realization that he’d been speaking to her the whole time in Spanish.

  He’d been speaking to her in Spanish and she’d understood him perfectly.

  That was all well and good except for the fact that she didn’t speak Spanish.

  Not a single word.

  She’d stayed quiet after that, allowing the nurse the doctor summoned, an amiable middle-aged woman who wore a rosary and looked at her like she was the second coming of the Blessed Mother, to lead her back to the bed and tuck her in. From that same nurse Gabrielle learned that she was in a private hospital just across the Mexican border in the city of Juarez and that she’d been there for just shy of six months.

  Her wristband had the name Anna Rodriguez stamped on it, but it wasn’t a name that she recognized.

  She waited until the nurse left and then took a peek at the medical records hanging in a rack at the end of her bed. They told her that Anna was a former U.S. Marine who had been vacationing in Mexico when tragedy struck. A motorcycle accident had left her with head injuries so extensive that she’d been in danger of slipping away entirely by the time the ambulance attendants wheeled her into the surgical suite at the hospital. The notes stated that Vargas and his team had gone to work immediately, doing what they could to stop the cranial hemorrhaging and to clear out as much of the damaged tissue as possible before knitting her skull back together. From the x-rays it looked like they’d used enough steel pins and plates that she could probably now set off a metal detector from ten feet away.

  The file laid it all out in black and white; so much of her brain tissue was damaged or removed during surgery that there was no hope of her ever leading a normal life if she regained consciousness, which, frankly, no one expected her to do. She’d remained in a coma, lying silently in her bed and being cared for by Dr. Vargas and his staff, until she’d awoken earlier that evening.

  Some hand-written notes stated that efforts to get her back to the United States had gone nowhere. She had no living family, no one to take over her care. She’d been away from her adopted family, the Marine Corps, for almost two years and as a result was not a priority in the government’s eyes either. Contact had been made with a caseworker in the Veterans Administration, but there was no urgency from that quarter to assume the financial burden of caring for her and so she’d been left in the care of the hospital while the paperwork to bring her home moved slowly through the system.

  It was a lot to take in, to say the least.

  Especially given the fact that she knew that they were wrong. The body she was in might have belonged to a woman named Anna Rodriquez, but that was not who she was.

  Her name was Gabrielle, Gabrielle Williams, and she repeated it to herself over and over again in the darkness of her hospital room to be certain that she didn’t forget.

  It was immediately apparent to her that her memory was full of holes. She could remember certain things quite vividly – her husband’s face; the taste of her favorite ice cream, Rocky Road; the way her staff felt in her hands as she used it to smash a spectre’s skull to pieces – but much of what she’d gone through in the last several years was seemingly lost and she had no idea whether that loss was permanent or temporary. Even worse, she had no way of knowing exactly how much was lost, as she had no memory of losing it in the first place!

  That scared her.

  If she’d simply lost her memory as a result of the accident the way the doctor claimed, she wouldn’t be worried. But she knew there was more to it than that.

  Much more.

  Certain memories shone like beacons in the night, but their very nature made her doubt their veracity for they were more like scenes from some fantastical movie than anything else, visions of strange cities and spectral creatures, of demons awake in the darkness and angels silently guiding their charges through the depths of the night.

  One thing was clear, though. She knew that there was a conflict unfolding around her, a rather significant one, in fact, between the forces of good and those of evil, as crazy as that sounded, and, even crazier, she knew that she had a part to play in that conflict. She didn’t know all the details, not by a long shot, but she knew that she had come back to deliver a warning. Something calamitous loomed on the horizon, some horrible shift in the balance of things that was certain to effect not just her and her husband but everyone, everywhere, and she was determined to deliver that warning.

  Provided she could remember what it was.

  She glanced once more into the mirror, taking in the stranger’s face that was, for better or worse, now her own and vowed she’d get out of here sooner rather than later.

  The clock was ticking, even if she didn’t know what it was ticking toward.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Andale, Anna! Lo puedes hacer. Una pie tras la otra. Empuja, Anna, empuja!”

  Gabrielle bit down on the urge to correct the other woman’s use of the wrong name for what felt like the hundredth time and concentrated instead on not falling over from sheer exhaustion as the surface of the treadmill continued its unrelenting movement beneath the soles of her feet. Despite the three weeks that had passed since she’d regained consciousness, she was still struggling to think of herself as Anna. The hospital staff had no problem with it, of course; they didn’t know any better. As far as they were concerned, she was the same woman who had arrived in the back of an ambulance just this side of death six months earlier, the same woman they had cared for every day since, the same woman they’d never expected would recover from her injuries.

  Anna or not, her sudden awakening had been a bit of a surprise to all involved.

  “Dos minutos mas! Andale, Anna!”

  Her trainer, Magda, stood nearby but Gabrielle knew from prior experience that she wouldn’t do anything to help her through the grueling session. Magda believed very strongly in the “throw her in and hope she doesn’t sink” variety of therapy, something Gabrielle had found out the hard way during their first session when Magda watched her crash ignominiously to the floor when her legs had given out. The hard-nosed physical therapist had stared at her for a moment and then, without a change of expression, told her to stop slacking off and get back to work.

  There was no coddling here; that was for certain.

  Gabrielle didn’t mind. She knew that the clock was ticking; there was only so much time to whip her body into shape and get it ready for what was coming. She needed someone willing to
drive her as hard as possible if she was ever going to be ready before the darkness descended upon them all. Magda was all too happy to oblige.

  The grueling, unrelenting pace was paying off in spades. Gabrielle’s body was transforming itself, regaining the muscle tissue, strength, and dexterity lost at a startling rate during the months she’d lain in a coma. No one had said anything to her yet, but she could tell from the look in their eyes when they watched her that she was healing at an extraordinary rate. Her muscles had deteriorated to next to nothing after spending six months lying unmoving in that bed and yet in just few short weeks she had nearly recovered everything that she had lost. She could feel herself getting stronger every single day and knew her time here was, by necessity, coming to an end.

  She’d delayed long enough; it was time to find Cade.

  “Done!” Magda called and Gabrielle breathed a sigh of relief.

  She caught the towel Magda tossed in her direction, stumbled off the slowing treadmill and over to a nearby chair, collapsing into it with the grace of a pregnant water buffalo. She didn’t care what she looked like. All that mattered was that she’d completed the run. It had been her longest yet; two full miles.

  It might not be a Herculean achievement, she thought, but for a woman who’d been in a coma recently, it wasn’t half-bad.

  She wasn’t ready to rest on her laurels yet, however. She had a long way to go, given what was to come. Her fitness routine was going to have to continue, even after she left this place.

  Her very life might depend on it.

  Lost in thought, she barely noticed when Magda came over and sat down in front of her.

  “All right. Spill it.”

  Gabrielle eyed her wearily. “Spill what?”

  “Whatever’s going on with you,” Magda said. “You’ve been like someone possessed these last few days. I thought you were going to drive that treadmill right through the floor.”

  For a one crazy, half-filled moment Gabrielle considered telling the truth but she clamped her mouth shut tight against the urge and the danger passed. She’ll learn soon enough, Gabrielle thought. They all will.

  She shook her head, both to scatter the thought and to hide her true feelings as she said, “I’m just sick of being helpless. I want to get out of here. Get back to my life, you know?”

  To her surprise, Magda nodded sympathetically. “I get it. Really I do. And it’s a good sign that you’re on your way to healing. But you don’t want to injure yourself in the process; that could set you back weeks. So pay attention to your body and don’t push yourself too far past your limits. Give it time; you’ll get there.”

  Time is something I don’t have, Gabrielle thought, but she nodded nonetheless.

  “Good. Take five and then we’ll work your upper body for a bit.”

  Magda got up to check on another patient, leaving Gabrielle to grab a few minutes of rest and get her breathing back under control. There was a television playing in the corner of the room, set to an afternoon news broadcast, and Gabrielle watched it absently at first, then with increasingly more attention as the nature of the individual stories filtered through her exhaustion. Each segment seemed to be more intense than the one before, each story more violent that the one that preceded it and Gabrielle soon found her gaze glued to the screen with the kind of horrified fascination you feel as you drive by a particularly nasty traffic accident, not wanting to see but unable to look away.

  From savage acts of terrorism on the global stage to rioters protesting in the streets in half-a-dozen cities across the U.S., it seemed to Gabrielle that the world was slowly going insane. Every story was filled with violent depravity of one kind or another and as the broadcast went on she began to feel that the anchors were relaying the details with increasing levels of relish, as if taking some kind of strange pleasure in embracing the horror to the nth degree, not wanting their viewers to miss even a single, perverse moment.

  Gabrielle was no stranger to violence. The things she’d seen and experienced in the last several years defied most people’s imaginations. She should have been inured to what she was seeing on the screen and yet something about it all struck a nerve in the back of her mind and sparked a sudden certainty.

  It’s starting, she thought.

  The thought was a disquieting one, for she wasn’t quite sure what she meant. It was starting? What was starting? She didn’t know. She assumed it had something to do with the Adversary but no matter how hard she thought about it she couldn’t come up with any more information. Whatever it was remained locked within the recesses of her memory, perhaps for good.

  With that realization came another; she had even less time than she’d expected to get herself back into shape and prepare for…whatever was to come. She’d hoped she’d have a month, perhaps even two, to rebuild her strength and stamina and to regain as much of her admittedly fractured memories as possible, but now she was filled with a sense of urgency, one that suggested her time could be measured in weeks, if not days, instead.

  She just hoped it would be enough.

  After the commercial, the focus switched from national to local news and Gabrielle took that as her cue to get back to work. She got up, intending to move over to the shoulder press to start her upper body workout as she’d been told, but something the newscaster said caught her attention. She turned to face the screen once more, noting that the male anchor who’d been seated behind the desk in the previous shot had now been replaced by a dark-haired reporter standing outside an older-looking multi-story building with a bright red cross affixed to its side.

  Despite the fact that neither the building nor the reporter seemed familiar to her, Gabrielle felt drawn to what was being said and gave it her full attention.

  “…that’s right, Sebastian,” the reporter was saying, no doubt responding to something the anchor had just asked her. “Behind me is the Centro Medico de Especialdades, where the patient they are calling the Miracle Woman of Juarez regained consciousness just a few short weeks ago.”

  A chill raced up Gabrielle’s spine and settled at the base of her skull.

  The Miracle Woman of Juarez?

  Something about the phrase was oddly disquieting, though Gabrielle didn’t quite know why. She moved a few steps closer, hoping it might help her to hear better, but no sooner had she done so that there was a sharp click and the television screen went dark.

  “Hey!” Gabrielle said, turning in time to see Magda toss the remote back onto the table from which she’d picked it up. “I was watching that.”

  Magda looked at her and shrugged. “You don’t need to see that. You’ve got work to do.”

  Gabrielle’s eyes narrowed and she was struck with the distinct impression that her therapist’s tone was just a hair too casual. As if she were trying too hard to make her actions seem trivial and unimportant.

  She’s lying, Gabrielle thought. I do need to see it.

  She didn’t know why, exactly. She just knew that she was right.

  “Turn it back on, please,” she asked, wanting to see the rest of the segment now more than ever.

  Magda ignored her, concentrating on making notes in the folder in her hand instead.

  What the hell?

  Gabrielle headed across the room, intent on turning the tv back on for herself if Magda wouldn’t do it, and she could feel herself mentally getting ready for a confrontation as she went. She wasn’t normally the confrontational type; seemed she was wound a bit more tightly than usual.

  She better not try to stop me, she thought, and was only slightly relieved when Magda left her alone. Gabrielle snatched the remote off the table and flipped the television back on, but the reporter had already wrapped up the segment and the weather was now on.

  Let it go, a voice in the back of her head suggested, but she wasn’t willing to listen to it. Not yet.

  She whirled around and got right in Magda’s face.

  “Just what the hell was that about?” she demanded.

/>   CHAPTER FOUR

  Madga stared at her. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” Gabrielle asked, bewildered by the direction the conversation had taken and annoyed that Magda was being so circumspect about whatever it was. Until now her therapist had always been direct to the point of painfully blunt and it wasn’t like her to beat around the bush.

  Not like her at all.

  The half-irritated, half-pitying expression on the other woman’s face wasn’t making Gabrielle feel better about the situation either.

  Taking a deep breath to keep herself calm, she said, “Why don’t you just explain it to me?”

  Whatever “it” was.

  But Magda shook her head, saying, “It’s better if I show you.”

  Gabrielle stared at her a moment, now thoroughly confused, and then said, “Well, by all means then, show me.”

  Still wearing that odd little expression, Madga led her out of the room and down the hallway outside. Gabrielle began to slow down as they neared the elevator, but Madga shook her head and pointed at the glowing exit sign at the end of the hall.

  “Trust me; if we’re seen in that elevator we’ll be trapped in seconds. Much better to take the stairs.”

  Trapped?

  Things were getting weirder by the minute, it seemed. Shaking her head, Gabrielle fell in behind Magda as the other woman opened the door to the stairwell and headed downward.

  They descended three flights, stopping a few steps from the ground floor. Magda turned and held a finger to her lips, waiting for Gabrielle to nod her understanding, and then, once she had, gestured for her to move closer to the door. Once they were both in position, Magda slowly opened the door, not more than a crack really, just enough to let her companion see into the lobby beyond.