Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) by Joseph Nassise Read Free Book Online

tending toward cruelty. That worried Riley. Granted, it had only been a demon, but still...
    Cade cut into his stream of thought.
    “What news of the Adversary?”
    The question was asked casually enough, but Riley could hear the raw need in his friend’s voice. This was tearing Cade up from the inside, just as the Necromancer had hoped and planned. It made Riley furious; he wished that they could kill the sonofabitch all over again.
    “Nothing. Echo, Charlie, and Delta teams have been assigned to the search full-time for the last two weeks and the Preceptor just added Gamma to the mix, but so far we haven’t found a damn thing. It’s like the bastard just up and vanished.”
    Cade’s brow narrowed. ”Come on, somebody has to know something.”
    “If they do, they aren’t talking to us. We’ve rousted every friendly I could think of, from the shifter community off of Route 1 to the coven of hedge witches living in that freaky mansion in Westport. Got nowhere.”
    “Maybe you’re asking the wrong people,” Cade said.
    Riley took that as an oblique reference to Cade’s interrogation the night before. ”Trust me, you aren’t the only one questioning the Adversary’s potential allies. We’ve done more raids in the last two weeks than I can ever remember doing and we’ve still got nothing. The bastard’s fallen off the face of the earth and I suspect we won’t find him until he wants to be found.”
    Cade didn’t have to say that it would be too late if they waited for that to happen. They had to hit the Adversary now, before he could bring his plans to fruition or there likely wouldn’t be any stopping him.
    Cade opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by the ringing of Riley’s cell phone. The peculiar ringtone told Riley that it wasn’t a casual call; dispatch only used the tone for a unit-wide alert.
    Riley snatched his phone from his pocket and answered the call.
    “Riley.”
    “Operations, Knight Captain. We’ve got a possible SSE sighting and Echo is being tasked with responding.”
    SSE was the Order’s code for Suspected Supernatural Entity, one of the more common alerts teams like Echo had to deal with on a regular basis. The dispatch sergeant rattled off an address, which Riley committed to memory.
    “Anything else you can tell me?” Riley said into the phone.
    “The initial report mentioned seeing a red-haired woman with large, bat-like wings.”
    Riley froze. He knew that there were a lot of creatures that fit that description, from harpies to fallen angels, but it was the specific mention of the hair color that caught his attention.
    Gabrielle Williams had that color hair. And the last time she’d been seen, she had just sprouted giant, bat-like wings from the center of her back.
    He could feel Cade watching him, no doubt wondering what the call was about, but Riley didn’t dare look in his direction for fear of giving the situation away. With the shoot-to-kill order in effect, Cade would be in danger if he tried to make an appearance and that’s exactly what he would do if he knew what Riley was thinking.
    “Can’t you get Beta or Delta to deal with it?” he asked, putting a bit of annoyance into his tone.
    The dispatcher was caught off-guard by the question and there was a moment of silence while he no doubt tried to come up with a polite way of telling Riley that he was out of his mind; not an easy thing to do when the man you were addressing outranked you.
    Then again , Riley thought, non-coms had been doing that very thing with officers ever since war was first invented. It probably wasn’t the first time the sergeant had to answer a stupid question.
    Riley didn’t care if it was stupid, as it was all for show anyway. He was simply trying to throw Cade off the scent.
    The dispatcher chose the safe route. ”I’m sorry, sir, I’m not sure I heard you properly.”
    Good for you , Riley thought.
    Aloud he said, “Oh, never mind. We’ll handle it. Riley out,” and