Shades of Blood and Darkness (Templar Chronicles Missions eNovella #1) by Joseph Nassise Read Free Book Online Page B

one else could hear, and his face went slack. Out of the corner of his eye Cade caught Riley looking at him quizzically, but he kept his eyes on the prisoner, watching him closely and didn’t respond.
    Without a change in expression, Alvarez began to shake. His head twisted from side to side erratically as it shuddered atop his neck, darting this way and that like a hyperactive hummingbird. His mouth opened wide, stretching impossibly far. It seemed as if he was screaming, but no sound issued forth. Finally, with a loud pop, his lower jaw dislocated itself.
    Cade calmly watched, his gun unwavering from the target.
    The shaking intensified, the legs of the chair skipping and bumping against the tiles, leaving little skid marks in the blood pooling beneath Alvarez’s feet. A strange squealing sound came from his throat. Alvarez’s eyes bulged from their sockets, and blood ran freely from his ears.
    Still, Cade stood and waited.
    It was only when a widening crack appeared in the center of the prisoner’s forehead, a crack that dripped a substance far darker than blood, that Cade reacted.
    With a twitch of his trigger finger, he put a bullet through Alvarez’s skull.
    The prisoner and his chair went over backward to lie still on the blood-stained tiles.
    In the silence that followed, no one moved for several long moments as they waited to be certain the thing that had once been Juan Alvarez was good and truly dead, then Cade gave the signal, and the team went instantly into motion. One of the men policed the brass from the floor while another checked to be certain no one had left anything behind that might betray their presence in the house. Thirty seconds later the team was filing out the front door and climbing back into the Expeditions, with Cade and Riley taking open seats in the lead vehicle.
    Less than five minutes after entry the team was on its way, leaving behind seven bodies to lie cooling in the darkness.

    *** ***

    Later that night.
    He stands alone in the center of the street, in a town that has no name. He has been here before, more than once, but each time the resolution is different, as if the events about to transpire are ordained by the random chance found in the motion of a giant spinning wheel, a cosmic wheel of fortune, and not by the actions he is about to take or has taken before.
    He knows from previous experience that, just a few blocks beyond this one the town suddenly ends, becoming a great plain of nothingness, the landscape an artist’s canvas that stands untouched, unwanted.
    This town has become the center of his universe.
    Around him, the blackened buildings sag in crumbling heaps, testimony to his previous visits. He wonders what the town will look like a few weeks from now, when the confrontation about to take place has been enacted and re-enacted and reenacted again, until even these ragged shells stand no more. Will the road, like the buildings, be twisted and torn?
    He does not know.
    He turns his attention back to the present, for even after all this time, he might learn something new that could lead him to his opponent’s true identity.
    The sky is growing dark, though night is still hours away. Dark grey storm clouds laced with green-and-silver lightning are rolling in from the horizon, like horses running hard to reach the town’s limits before the fated confrontation begins. The air is heavy with impending rain and the electrical tension of the coming storm. In the slowly fading afternoon light the shadows around him stretch and move. He learned early on that they can have a life of their own.
    He avoids them now.
    The sound of booted feet striking the pavement catches his attention, and he knows he has exhausted his time here. He turns to face the length of the street before him, just in time to see his foe emerge from the crumbled ruins at its end, just as he has emerged each and every time they have encountered one another in this place. It is as if his enemy is always there,